A Knight Doesn't Want to Be Reinstated (2)
"Air Walk isn't a trick you pull off just by exploding your strength. What it takes is a high degree of focus, and a fine sense for what you're doing."
Lee Han explained it as simply as he could manage. A promise was a promise. It wasn't quite a motto, but it was close enough, and once he had decided to teach someone, he gave it everything he had.
"Kicking off empty air isn't the point. What matters is gathering your energy at the toes in a hurry, spreading it wide, and turning that into a foothold you can step on before it fades. You lot are already past masters at handling fighting energy, so I figured it would come easily enough…"
Teaching them with everything he had was one thing. The results were another.
"…Yeah. Every last one of you looks pathetic."
He clicked his tongue at the knights strewn across the ground.
"…Is this really possible?"
"Huuuurrk!"
"I-I'm getting motion sick."
A hundred eagles, their long tradition and their skill known even beyond the kingdom's borders — and those same eagles were rolling miserably in the dirt, groaning. Call it the fate of men who failed Air Walk. They weren't dead, but not one of them was a pretty sight.
Even their failures are loud. These bastards.
The hundred knights had found a hundred ways to fail. Told to perform Air Walk, one of them launched himself with a tremendous midair jump, swam through a good fifty feet of sky, and dropped straight back down. Told to walk the heavens, another abruptly flipped upside down. And the most ridiculous of the lot…
The one who turned a somersault and slammed into the cliff was the funniest.
A man who had gifted him a year's worth of laughter. The fellow buried in the cliff was surely in pain, but from the outside there had never been a spectacle quite like it. The rest were mostly the same, destroying themselves in failures that all looked more or less alike. Lee Han watched every one of the hundred fail, set about finding the problem, and needed less than ten minutes of thought to see it.
"It's the Fighting Art."
As he had said the day before, Fighting Art was the art of detonating the energy already in the body so that the power inside you multiplied. A bomb going off in your flesh, more or less, with that blast converted into physical ability — and the higher your realm, the more violent the explosion. But then. How hard was it, really, to handle energy that explosive with any delicacy at all?
I thought they'd pick it up easily. This is going to take longer than I figured.
Not one of these knights had failed to be called a genius or a prodigy. He had been sure they would learn it at once. Trust a problem like this to jump out at him.
"…Are we incapable of learning this method of walking on air?"
One knight asked it after reading Lee Han's face. Lee Han shook his head.
"It's not that you can't learn it. You just have to learn how to handle fighting energy with a light touch. In short, build fine control."
"I am reasonably confident in my control…"
Vale's mutter, and the rest of the order nodded along. They were hardly beginners thrashing about with an art they had just learned. They had honed their control of fighting energy to the limit so they could fight longer. The objection came out edged with resentment, and Lee Han met it head-on.
"Oh, for fuck's sake. Even my kids can manage control like that. What I want is — haah! Easier to show you than to explain."
What good was talking until his tongue fell out? As he had just said, not one of them had gone without being called a genius or a prodigy, and geniuses and prodigies had filthy pride. They never listened to anyone. Students or not, some of them would fail to accept his explanation, and others would simply doubt it. Without fail. So Lee Han gave up on explaining, glanced around, and settled on a tree thick with leaves.
"This ought to do."
The knights only stared. He picked up a single fallen leaf from the ground beneath the tree and set it afloat on the lake, and they blinked, wondering what in the world he was doing. Then—
"Watch closely."
Whoosh!
As if to demonstrate, Lee Han turned a somersault and dove for the lake. What followed was—
Tok.
"……?"
A sight that had stepped clean outside the laws of physics.
"Wh-what is that…?"
"Where does a man even learn something like that?"
"…Am I dreaming?"
The knights gaped as if they had been made fools, and they saw it. They had braced for a splash when he hit the water like a diver. There was no splash. The lake lay perfectly still. And on that lake—
"See? This is what I mean by controlling force."
Lee Han stood on one foot, a single leaf for his foothold.
Ride a single reed, and cross the river.
Regrettably, there wasn't a reed leaf anywhere in sight, so a tree leaf had been forced to stand in. Anyway! The reed was not the point.
"What you need is delicacy and concentration. Delicacy enough to regulate even your own weight to the extreme, and concentration enough to hold this state for more than thirty minutes. Once you have that much, then you can start using the word control."
"……"
"Anyone who still isn't convinced, step up. Pull this off and I'll call you big brother on the spot."
"…Heh."
As if. The knights couldn't even muster a rebuttal. They only stared, blank, wondering how such a thing could be done at all. And they thought—
"For a while, we're going to have men falling into the water by the dozen."
The order would be full of fellows playing in the lake. Even Vale, who said as much—
I have to try it this instant!
—was overflowing with the urge. The part where the entire knight order plunged in, caught colds, and struck the marquis utterly dumb came four days later.
Lee Han had never even told them to practice One Reed Crosses the River, yet he snorted a laugh as knights leapt into the river clutching a single leaf. Men, it seemed, were the same in every world. Well. He was similar enough himself.
I practiced this a hell of a lot, too.
Remembering his previous life, the techniques he had drilled after learning Gyeong were many and varied, but no one knew how hard he had worked to make One Reed Crosses the River his own. He had nearly drowned more times than he could count. Don't ask why. The thought had occurred to him, so he tried. Those attempts, and that effort, had not been useless. The root of the Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow and the Diamond Body he had completed now could, if you traced it back, be found in One Reed Crosses the River. From the outside both looked like nothing but raw force, but in truth the instantaneous control of strength, and the concentration behind it, mattered more than anything. So Lee Han didn't bother stopping the knights who kept slamming into the water. He had learned in his own body that if you kept at it, all of it helped.
There's a reward in teaching.
They had passion, and talent to spare. People said nothing satisfied a teacher like a sharp student, and the saying was exactly right. Also—
I'm getting something out of it.
He wasn't trotting out the usual line about learning by teaching.
I like that these guys don't dodge a fight.
Perhaps they were still bitter about losing to him the day before. Whatever the reason, the knights came to Lee Han first and asked to spar. Sometimes it was one against one, sometimes many against one, and either way he was glad of it. No amount of solo strength training and technique drills could build real combat ability. Simply having the chance to fight — no, to spar — without end against all kinds of opponents was an opportunity he couldn't dismiss. In his past life and in this one, a proper sparring partner had to be paid for. These men came to him of their own accord. He could not have been more grateful. Perhaps that was why. After nearly a week of coming and going from the marquis's estate, Lee Han's body was in peak condition. Anyone else who sparred this indiscriminately would have been bruised without a day's rest and might well have broken down, but so long as potions existed, few people in this world ruined themselves merely by sparring a great deal. Lee Han least of all.
Every one of them has an interesting technique. Especially that Sword Thread, was it? I really want that one.
A technique that spread sword ki out like thread. On usefulness alone, it seemed far more versatile than the Plum Blossom Sword.
I can't move the plum blossoms the way I want.
Sword Thread, by contrast, could be handled freely according to the swordsman's will. Even so, a technique like that demanded talent and insight pushed to the limit, so for him to learn it… well.
Not something I can pick up right away.
Lee Han chewed on the regret.
"Why the face, Sir Lee Han?"
"Worry about your own looks before mine. You're a cat that fell in the river."
Vale had failed One Reed Crosses the River six times running and climbed back onto land looking like a drowned rat. He shook the water off with a bitter smile.
"This is considerably difficult. How in the world does one float on a blade of grass?"
"I'm nothing. There's a man who crossed a river with nothing but a single reed leaf."
"A river, you say…"
"For the record, it wasn't just any river. He crossed the Nineveh Grand Canal."
"…You might as well say he crossed the sea."
The Nineveh Grand Canal — the vast waterway managed by Galahad. Those who first looked on the waters of Nineveh were said to suspect the place might be the sea itself. A river huge enough to be mistaken for the ocean. And someone had crossed water like that on a single reed leaf?
"Was that person a fairy, or an Aura User?"
"Couldn't tell you if he was a fairy or an Aura User. Just a monk. A monk."
"A monk? …A Monk, you mean? Hmm. A saint-class Monk, perhaps? If so, such a man might be able to use a mystery of that sort…"
"……"
Vale was committing the appalling act of turning Bodhidharma into a clergyman, but Lee Han didn't bother to correct him. In a kingdom that treated nearly every faith except its sole religion, the Light of Radiance, as heresy, mentioning Buddhism would only get him branded a heretic himself. He had no desire to tangle with the Inquisitors, so he quietly let the misunderstanding stand and turned the subject.
"More importantly, there's something I'm curious about. That Sword Thread—"
"—Sir Lee Han! Is Sir Ihan Turtle here!"
"……?"
He had been about to ask what he wanted to know when a servant of the marquis's house suddenly called for him. Lee Han turned a blank look on the man. Vale stepped in first.
"Why all the noise? Do you not know this is a training ground?"
"Ah, Sir Vale. M-my apologies. The matter is rather urgent…"
"Urgent?"
"Yes, over there…"
"…Hm?"
"Hehe, hello."
"…?"
A royal maid. A servant of the royal household offered him a bright smile, and Vale forgot even to be angry. The moment he saw the maid, Layla Winter, his anger vanished as if by magic. Lee Han left the dazed knight where he was and gave her a puzzled look.
"Miss Maid?"
"Sir Knight~."
At Layla's appearance, Lee Han blinked. This was the hour she usually napped in the hammock at the cabin. He knew well that sleeping in the cool shade had become her recent habit, and he couldn't see why she would give up even that nap to come here.
"It's nothing else. They asked me to deliver this!"
"…?"
What she held out was a luxurious letter, its wax hardened into the shape of a lion — a striking seal. But the lion, the crest of the Silver Lion, made Lee Han's face go hard. Somehow it felt ominous.
I want to burn it…
It had come from the knight order, his old workplace, and that unsettled him in several ways. He could hardly burn it with everyone watching, so he meant only to take the letter from Layla. Pocket it, and deal with it later. But—
"Ah, they said to read it the moment you get it. They were worried Sir Knight might secretly burn it."
"This woman, I swear—!"
Mind reading, as if she saw through everything he did. Only one person used that, and Lee Han's brow crumpled.
"……Tch."
He put on the most unwilling face he could manage, unfolded the letter, and slowly began to read. A feast of language, packed with complicated rhetoric. The contents made his head spin from the reading alone, but when he worked through them carefully enough to understand—
"…What kind of bullshit is this?!"
He crumpled the letter on the spot.
Ihan Turtle is hereby commanded to temporary reinstatement.
That was the letter, briefly summarized, and Lee Han seethed. This woman wasn't training some mutt! She had told him to get out, and now she wanted him back? It wasn't funny. What did she take him for?
This time I'm not letting it go!
He made up his mind. Sister or not, today he was going to settle this properly. Just as he resolved to tend the hand axe sleeping at his side—
"Oh, right. Sir Knight, Her Highness said to give you this as well!"
"……"
"Hehe, she said you'd like it, and I guess she was right."
"…Miss Maid."
"Yes?"
"……If you had something like this, you should have given it to me first."
"I'm sorry."
"No, no, these things happen! Ahaha!"
Lee Han laughed, big and hearty. And well he might. The gift the maid drew from her bosom poured cold water straight through his boiling anger, and his insides went cool and clear.
A radiance that unraveled anger itself.