The path out of the cave was nothing like the way in.
Coming in, he'd slipped through the trap formations, stepped into the blind spots of the guards, and held his breath the whole way. Going out, a silver-white creature the size of a small mountain was trotting cheerfully at his heels. As exits went, this one was about as far from subtle as it was possible to get.
*…Okay, this is way more conspicuous than I planned.*
Pung Hyeon glanced back. The thunder tiger, despite its enormous bulk, padded along half a step behind him like an eager puppy. Every time its paws touched the ground, blue sparks crackled and skittered across the stone, leaving a dotted trail of scorched prints in their wake.
Clearly, a stealthy escape was off the table. That left exactly one option.
*Fast. Really, really fast. One clean break before anyone can grab me.*
Pung Hyeon seized a fistful of fur at the thunder tiger's scruff and vaulted onto its massive back — the same effortless lightness that had once skimmed across a deer's spine and brushed a sparrow's wing.
The thunder tiger flicked its ears at the unfamiliar weight, then seemed to recognize who had climbed aboard. It settled low and still, as though this were something it had always done.
"Alright. Let's move."
"Stop right there!"
A voice rang out — clear as a bell, sharp as a blade — and cut through the jungle mist.
Namgung Ryeo.
She stood blocking the path between the cave and the jungle's edge. Her sword was still sheathed, but her stance said it wouldn't stay that way for long.
Then her gaze landed on the sword strapped across Pung Hyeon's back.
Her pupils went wide.
"The Thunderclap Sword!"
Her voice caught in her throat. Three hundred years. Three hundred years the clan had done nothing but keep it sealed. The divine blade that no one since the seventh clan master, Namgung Hwi, had ever been able to draw — left to a beast, all but abandoned — was now slung across a stranger's back as casually as a walking stick.
And that stranger was sitting astride the thunder tiger — the legendary creature every bit as storied as the sword itself — like it was a horse he'd rented for the afternoon.
A passage from the *Chronicle of the Namgung Clan Masters*, passed down only to the direct line, surfaced in Namgung Ryeo's mind.
[*Seventh Clan Master — Namgung Hwi: From birth, he was an anomaly, born carrying thunder energy within him. He gripped a sword at three, awakened his inner energy at five, and by twelve was said to have surpassed the clan elders in swordsmanship — a talent so extraordinary that even the word 'once-in-a-generation' fell short. The Thunderclap Sword was a blade of legend, said to answer only to one who had become one with thunder energy. In the year Namgung Hwi turned sixteen, he left a note reading 'the Thunderclap Sword is calling to me' and departed to find it — and became its master. The moment he gripped it, thunder rolled across the sky and lightning poured into the blade. He was called the Lord of the Thunderclap Sword, and he was the foremost hero of the war between the orthodox and unorthodox factions. He reigned as the greatest martial artist under heaven throughout his life. At sixty, he drove the sword into its current resting place, charged the thunder tiger with guarding it until a worthy master appeared, and vanished. As for how he came to meet the thunder tiger: at eighteen, while wandering the martial world, he encountered the creature in Thunder Cloud Valley on the Tianshan range — a beast that had grown mighty by consuming lightning itself. When Namgung Hwi channeled thunder energy through the Thunderclap Sword, the tiger bowed its head in submission rather than attacking. From that day forward, the thunder tiger followed him like his own shadow, becoming a living symbol of Namgung Hwi himself…*]
Every piece of common sense Namgung Ryeo had spent a lifetime building quietly collapsed before the scene in front of her.
"You… drew it?"
"Oh — this?" Pung Hyeon hooked a thumb toward the sword on his back and arranged his face into the most nonchalant expression he could manage.
Inside, he was chanting one thing on a loop: *Please don't draw your sword. Please don't draw your sword.*
He couldn't tell her the truth here. The truth was: *I had no idea what this place was, I thought it was just some fancy cave, I only went in because the tiger was going to kill me, I touched a shiny sword and it came out on its own, and I have absolutely no idea why this animal is following me.* But that truth was too pathetic, too small, too wildly out of step with the inflated legend of this place.
So Pung Hyeon did what he always did.
Said something. Made it sound good.
"Miss Namgung." He kept his voice even. "This sword has been caged here far too long."
"…What?"
"Three hundred years of nothing but a seal. Not a soul to hear it cry."
Pung Hyeon had never heard the sword cry anything. He'd grabbed it on a gamble and it had come free. But survival instinct moved faster than the Cheonroe Divine Steps, and his mind was already running at full speed.
"A great sword isn't meant to sit and rust in the dark. It's meant to go out into the world and be used for something worthy."
He said it — and then startled himself.
*…Okay, that actually sounded pretty good.*
Namgung Ryeo froze where she stood.
To her, those words were not the excuses of a thief.
She had spent her whole life with a sword in her hand. And for just as long, she had felt a quiet, nameless unease whenever she thought of the Thunderclap Sword sealed away in the clan's jungle. The clan that called itself the foremost sword clan under heaven — and yet couldn't draw its own greatest blade, leaving it to a beast, locked away in shame. No one ever said it aloud, but she had always known: the Thunderclap Sword wasn't the Namgung Clan's pride. It was their embarrassment.
And this stranger had just put his finger directly on that wound.
*A sword isn't meant to rust in the dark. It's meant to go out into the world.*
*…This person.*
Something in Namgung Ryeo's chest went warm again, for reasons she couldn't name. He wasn't framing this as theft. He was framing it as liberation — freeing what the clan had spent generations turning away from. And the maddening part was that she couldn't argue with him.
The sword had chosen him. The creature had bowed to him. Faced with those two facts, the word *thief* felt like a bad fit.
"…Who are you?"
She spoke slowly. Without realizing it, her hand had loosened on the hilt.
"What is it you're actually trying to do?"
The formality in her voice had shifted — this was a genuine question. Was he here to judge the clan's hypocrisy? To set the martial world right? What cause could possibly drive a person to do something like this?
Pung Hyeon met those deep, serious eyes.
And thought:
*…What do I say that gets me out of here without getting stabbed?*
The honest answer was *I want to not die, eat well, and live a long life*, but one look at those grave, searching eyes told him that answer would earn him a sword through the chest. So he chose the safest answer available.
Silence.
He said nothing. He just smiled — faintly, lightly — packaging the desperate urge to flee as the serene expression of a reclusive master who had transcended the need for words.
He had no idea that silence would birth yet another enormous misunderstanding.
Namgung Ryeo received that smile and that silence as *a meaning too deep to be spoken aloud.*
*The path of a true hero cannot be explained to someone who has not yet walked it.* That was how she read it. And in that moment, something inside her quietly tilted.
Namgung Ryeo — the Snow Sword, who had never once lost a duel in her life — felt, for the first time, standing before a man whose blade she had never crossed, how small she was.
"…I'll let you go. For today."
She spoke with effort, her trembling hand finally releasing the hilt.
"But promise me one thing. That sword…" She paused. "Use it the way a sword deserves to be used."
Pung Hyeon considered for a moment — or rather, felt like the atmosphere demanded he at least look like he was considering, so he let his gaze go blank for a beat. He had no idea what *using a sword the way a sword deserves* was supposed to mean, and honestly, given his current life goals, it seemed like something that would never come up. To him, the Thunderclap Sword was an expensive walking stick. But what this moment called for wasn't the truth. It was one line that got him out alive.
"…I will."
It wasn't exactly a lie. He wasn't planning to make any effort, but he couldn't entirely rule it out — so technically, if you squinted, it was closer to true than false. A fugitive's way with words always left the back door of conscience cracked open just a little.
Namgung Ryeo gave a faint nod.
And stepped aside.
The great Namgung Clan had just made way for a thief.
That was when everything went sideways.
"The — the barrier! The seal on the northern restricted zone is broken!"
"The creature! The thunder tiger is loose—!"
"Catch that thief who stole the Thunderclap Sword!"
Elders and warriors who had been delayed by the layered formations came sprinting in — and went pale as death the moment they saw Pung Hyeon astride the thunder tiger. Hundreds of swords rang free of their scabbards at once, and somewhere in the distance, the training ground bell began to toll like it had lost its mind.
DONG — DONG — DONG —
The situation collapsed into chaos in seconds. The hair on the back of Pung Hyeon's neck stood straight up.
*Oh, come on. What now. I need to move.*
No more waiting. Pung Hyeon locked both hands around the thunder tiger's scruff and shouted.
"Go, Lightning! Full speed!"
ROOOOAAR—!
The thunder tiger bellowed and launched off the ground.
BOOM—!
The massive silver-white body became a streak of blue lightning, tearing across the Namgung Clan's vast training grounds. Wherever its paws struck, electricity erupted. The Thunderclap Sword on Pung Hyeon's back resonated in answer, blazing with pale blue-white light. Man and sword and creature fused into a single bolt of thunder, blazing beneath the pre-dawn sky.
The warriors couldn't hold the line. They scattered left and right. There was no stopping it — this was not the kind of thing a human being could stand in front of.
In the middle of it all, Pung Hyeon clung to the thunder tiger's scruff for dear life, swallowing screams.
*AAAH IT'S TOO FAST I'LL DIE IF I FALL OFF SLOW DOWN NO WAIT GO FASTER NO—*
From the outside: a peerless master commanding blue lightning, cutting through the foremost sword clan in the world without a backward glance.
From the inside: a seventeen-year-old first-time fugitive hanging on with everything he had, desperately trying not to fall off a lightning tiger he had never ridden before in his life.
Nobody knew the difference.
The outer wall was right there.
The Namgung Clan's high perimeter wall. Any ordinary horse would have pulled up short. The thunder tiger crouched lower, coiling for the leap.
Pung Hyeon knew it in his gut before it happened.
*This thing is going over.*
"Jump, Lightning—!"
CRASH—!
The thunder tiger drove off the earth and soared. As that enormous silver-white body rose into the pre-dawn sky, blue lightning burst from its paws and traced a long arc along the top of the wall. The sight of it — it looked like a great thunder dragon ascending from the Namgung Clan's heavens.
Below the wall, Namgung Ryeo watched it rise. A sound escaped her lips before she could stop it.
"…Oh."
She knew she would never forget this moment.
A man wreathed in blue lightning, rising into the sky. Gone in less than half an hour — taking with him the sword and the creature the clan had kept locked away for three hundred years, leaving nothing behind but that retreating silhouette.
She could not make herself think of it as the back of a thief.
"Pung Hyeon."
The name the martial world was beginning to speak with reverence — she was carving it into her own chest now. Not as a rival. Not as a challenge. With a feeling she still couldn't find a name for.
The ice around the Snow Sword's heart developed its first hairline crack.
At that same moment, outside the wall.
Mageon had happened to be waiting on exactly the side Pung Hyeon escaped from, and he had witnessed the whole thing — what looked for all the world like a thunder dragon ascending into the heavens. His jaw was hanging open.
"…Did you see that."
He didn't look at the Beggars' Sect disciple standing beside him. His voice was shaking.
"Tell me you saw that. Every bit of it."
"I — I saw it, Elder! A — a blue dragon, rising into the sky—!"
"Write it down! Every single word, leave nothing out!"
At Mageon's command, the disciple's brush flew across the paper like a thing possessed.
【Pung Hyeon of the Cheonroe Sect tames the Namgung Clan's legendary thunder tiger in an instant, liberates the Thunderclap Sword from three hundred years of sealing, and departs the foremost sword clan astride a blue thunder dragon, ascending as if to heaven!】
Mageon stared at what the disciple had written and felt a shiver run through him.
"…This. This is the kind of legend that comes along once in a hundred years, if that."
The righteous hero who had punished the treacherous Gwak Clan. And now this — a man who had freed the divine sword and the sacred creature that the greatest sword clan in the world had kept imprisoned, and in doing so, rebuked the Namgung Clan's inadequacy. A living myth.
The snowball of misunderstanding had already become an avalanche. And that avalanche was filling rivers, swallowing plains, rolling toward the entire martial world.
As for the subject of all those legends —
Several hundred li from the Namgung Clan, on a quiet hillside, he had finally tumbled off the thunder tiger's back like a man falling out of bed, and was now spread-eagled in the grass, staring at the sky.
"Ugh… I genuinely thought I was going to die…"
His whole body was shaking like a leaf. The thunder tiger was fast in a way that should probably be illegal. He'd climbed on to survive and nearly died from the riding — if this was what life in the martial world felt like, he wasn't sure he'd signed up for the right thing.
The thunder tiger lay down beside him and pressed its nose to his face, sniffing with what seemed like concern.
*Zap.*
A little arc of blue electricity jumped from its nose. It didn't hurt.
"…That tickles. Get off."
Pung Hyeon pushed the enormous head away. The thunder tiger made a small, wounded sound — something between a grumble and a whine — but didn't move from his side.
Pung Hyeon lay there for a long while, watching the sky. Then he reached back, unstrapped the Thunderclap Sword, and held it up in front of his face. In the early morning light, the blade shimmered like the surface of a still blue lake.
He'd gotten the sword he came for. Picked up a thunder tiger as a bonus. And most importantly — he was still alive.
"Not bad."
He let out a small, dry laugh.
Of course, he had no idea that the martial world had already started calling him a living myth who rode a thunder dragon. He had no idea that the ice-cold Snow Sword of the Namgung Clan had pressed his retreating silhouette into her heart.
The only thing on his mind was this:
"Hey, Lightning. What do you eat?"
*Grrrr.*
"…Not people, right?"
The fugitive's second chapter closed — noisily — leaving behind one sword, one legendary creature, and yet another enormous legend its owner knew nothing about.