I Am the Sinner, Rihan (5)
A fight had broken out, and yet, astonishingly, no one cared.
The soldiers kept their watch outside the Tunnels and never once came in, so whether the men within fought or died was none of their concern. Most of the prisoners had already collapsed from exhaustion, and so the clash never became much of a topic—helped, above all, by the fact that it had not lasted two minutes.
Even so, not one person present took the brevity of that duel as a reason to think little of the opponent, or of the fight itself.
"Skilled hands. Suspicious or not, that's a knight from a proper house. The foundation's solid."
"I agree with you, Senior. A man whose skill put a chill down the spine. ...And a senior who can put a man like that down so easily is the part that doesn't make sense."
"...Monster."
Roy Bant's skill had been the real thing.
Set against the half-finished knights littering the Silver Lion Knight Order, he was at least twice as strong—strong enough that none of them could imagine putting him down so easily.
And yet.
"S-Sir Roy! Wh-what is the meaning of this...! What lawless violence is this, against a Sir Roy so weak! Fallen though we may be, we are knights of Britannia—how dare you stoop to such cowardice...! Have you no shame at all!"
"...You. How did you ever become a general?"
So it was. The gentleman who had once been a general had not only failed to grasp the skill of the man at his side—he had failed to see their exchange of blows at all.
They shot him a look gone cold as brine. Mustang, as if that only stoked his fury, drew breath to shout even louder.
"You—"
Thwack!
"Ghk...?!"
He folded.
"You're being far too loud."
A light blow to the back of the head, and Mustang was out. At last the surroundings went quiet. It was Jord's timely remedy, and Jake shook his head.
"You turning into that guy too?"
"Haha. This just seemed like the fastest way."
"...Honestly. Picking up the one habit you shouldn't."
"Nah. He's growing up fine. What's the problem."
"......You hurt anywhere."
"Not a scratch. Heh."
"...I-is that so."
Lee Han had come up beside them at some point, and he was perfectly unharmed. He looked less like a man who had fought than like a man who had stepped out for a short walk.
Had even a fighter of that caliber failed to leave a single scratch on him?
I'd guessed as much, but this kid... his skill has grown past any comparison with half a year ago.
Watching him put down a hundred and thirty-five of the Silver Lions without effort had given Jake the shape of it, but the real thing was a strength of another order entirely. Half a year ago he had already been a troll of a man, but now...
Even an ogre would have to yield a move.
Jake clicked his tongue, certain that in all the Silver Lion Knight Order, save Sir Baltar, there was no longer anyone who could stand against that vicious bastard.
Fortunately, Roy Bant was not dead.
A knight who earned his keep had a body to match, as expected. The back of his skull was split and the concussion was ugly enough that a partial loss of memory was a worry, but that much was no great problem. What mattered was that he was alive.
Thud!
They dragged him all the way to a dark place where almost no human presence could be felt, and Lee Han set Roy Bant down and drew a vial from inside his clothes.
Hiss.
He poured the contents straight over the wounds, and they knit themselves shut.
"A potion? That's not even giving the cure after you've given the disease..."
"If I want to hear anything out of him, he has to stay alive."
"...So he really was on death's door."
Well, a split skull would have made that no surprise. The strange part was that he hadn't been dying.
"Senior. Do you think this man really belongs to the Blood Cross Army?"
"Even if he doesn't, he's a suspicious bastard. That's enough."
"That much..."
Suspicious, without question. A man who had walked into the Tunnels with his Fighting Art still unsealed. A man trying to approach them in secret.
And...
"I suspect he is also the one who sent this incompetent general to us."
Sounding them out had been part of it too. Mustang would not have spoken to them of his own will. Roy Bant had probably been egging him on from behind, manufacturing an excuse to hold a conversation.
"He heard we were Britannian knights and figured he could use us somehow."
Most of the sinners locked in the Tunnels of late were from Britannia. From soldiers to knights, nearly everyone of any real strength had been gathered down here. He must have thought he could strike up a friendship with them in no time.
"Hard to see what friendship is worth in the Tunnels."
"Quite so."
"Why split hairs over it? Go to any country you like, and people still count blood, hometown, and school. He's the same. Don't make it complicated."
"...That is also true."
"Even so, I wonder if there's any point counting such things after coming all the way down here."
"Look over there. A man doing time who still won't shut up about rank."
"Ah."
"...Why are you looking at me?"
"You asking because you don't know?"
"......"
Whether Aren's face rotted off or not, Lee Han went quietly on with his own work. Before Roy Bant woke, he meant to see whether the man had hidden anything in his clothes.
Types like this always hide something.
Sure enough.
"What's this?"
How he had managed it was a mystery, but unlike the prison uniforms the rest of them wore, Roy Bant had an inner pocket—and out of it came some five suspicious items. A torn scrap of paper, three foul-smelling refinement drugs, and a Reverse Cross.
A glance was enough to know none of it was wholesome, and the Reverse Cross least of all.
"This can be nothing but the possession of an apostate who blasphemes God."
It put a foul taste in a devout believer's mouth. The three of them, Lee Han excepted, traced the cross with their hands and recited verses of scripture, as if to prove the strength of their faith.
"Hmm..."
Lee Han left the devout to it and simply studied the Reverse Cross. He had no sermon to offer about irreverence toward the gods. The thing merely gave off a wrongness as he looked at it, and that was reason enough to watch.
Then, all at once—
Crack.
"That isn't candy..."
"Even candy doesn't break that easily, Senior."
"Mad monster...!"
He had split the Reverse Cross cleanly in half. It was as if he had snapped a cookie, and Lee Han peered into what lay inside.
"This... a monster core?"
"What?"
"More precisely, something mixed with a monster core?"
"...It's real?!"
Fine grains glittered along the break. The light that played over the eyes was unmistakably the monster core that grew inside a monster.
And yet.
"They spent a monster core just to make one Reverse Cross? It's not as if they're drowning in coin..."
A monster core was a rare stone that formed in only one monster out of twenty. In a person it would amount to a gallstone—a rare item, and none too easy to obtain. Mages and alchemists went mad for the material, and the price was filthy. To use something that expensive on a Reverse Cross?
Even a rich man would not throw money away like that.
"...So he's a lunatic."
"Mm."
"Or these bastards are rich enough to laugh at monster cores. ...So which is it?"
"Lee Han?"
For a moment everyone was baffled by the sudden address. Then they realized he was speaking to the fallen Roy Bant, and their eyes went sharp.
"......"
Even under the pressure rising off them, Roy Bant did not so much as twitch. He looked unconscious.
And so—
Whoosh!
Lee Han raised his leg without hesitation and aimed it squarely at Roy Bant's head.
Boom!
A stomp that made the head swim. The ground caved in. Force enough to burst a man's skull like a watermelon.
Fortunately—
"...No different from a murderer. How can a man who calls himself a knight be so cruel with his hands..."
The bastard had barely dodged Lee Han's foot and was gasping in a corner. A heartbeat slower, and he would certainly have died. One bad performance of playing dead, and he would have left the world.
Lee Han snorted at the scolding. The man who had started the act was the one complaining. Honestly.
"Sneaky bastards like you don't move unless I mean it. Want me to make you play dead for real? I can't promise you'll wake up."
"......"
"Talk. Don't just glare."
"...Ngh."
Fwoosh!
Meeting that fierce stare, Roy Bant flinched. The presence was a living flame, and the moment the heat washed over him he felt a burning he had never known in his life—a presence that made him imagine his own body cooking.
Roy Bant admitted it. The man before him was a power he had no business facing.
At the very least—
A Champion. And one fit to stand for a kingdom...
Knights whose fame rang past the lord of a single region and through an entire kingdom. A level even Britannia could scarcely boast more than a few of.
Sweat poured off Roy Bant in a mad sheet as his eyes darted this way and that. He spun his thoughts without pause, hunting a way to come through this alive, and then—
"...I'll hand over about half of what I know. In exchange, guarantee my life and my safety. Get me out of here with you, and I'll give you every last scrap, nothing left out. For what it's worth, what I know is rather fine."
"......"
"You lot are Pendragon knights, aren't you? For Britannians, your skin is far too fair. That's Pendragon all over. Ah—except you."
"......"
"In any case, from Pendragon's side this is information beyond price. Of course it is. I know something that could shake even a kingdom's economy. So you have no choice but to—"
"This bastard doesn't know his place."
Crack.
Crunch—!
"Gyaaaaaah!"
Lee Han crushed the man's collarbone where it stood, as if he could not stand to hear another word of that bullshit.
"Ghhhhk!"
"Shut your mouth."
A hand crude beyond measure came down over the face this time. A palm twice the size of an ordinary man's covered Roy Bant's face entire, and then—
Creak!
"!!!"
It gave him the pressure of a whole face being crumpled in. His mouth was sealed as well, so Roy Bant could not even scream properly, and the pain went on for three minutes.
Three minutes. Someone might have called it a short while indeed.
"Hah—! Haaah—! Kehk! Kehaaak...!"
Roy Bant's face had aged as if time itself had struck him full on. Haggard in an instant. In a pain that made three minutes feel like three years, he had met a terror past anything he knew.
"You think you—no. You think you people have any right to negotiate?"
Lee Han's low voice carried a viciousness like a beast's growl.
Rage. He was in a fierce rage. The last time he had been angry like this was probably when he caught that spell-peddler.
In that moment Lee Han was certain this was one of the Blood Cross Army, or something wearing their name, and an anger he could not hold broke loose.
Was it because the Royal Capital had been attacked?
No. He was not that dutiful a knight, and he was not a just one. The reason for a fury this violent was simpler.
His people.
That might mean the students of the Academy. It might mean the owner of the bakery he always went to. It might mean the butcher who, for a cheap price, threw in extra meat as a kindness.
The people who shared his ordinary days. And these bastards had dared try to smash that ordinary life of his. If that was not worth rage, then what was?
And they wanted to negotiate?
......That was oil poured on a fire already raging.
Thud! Thud!
Lee Han struck Roy Bant's body lightly with his fist, three times. Not a beating—taps. It could almost have been a joke, but Lee Han's face was colder than it had ever been, and there was no joke in him.
Crrrack!!
"!!!?"
In an instant a grotesque resonance burst through Roy Bant's body. A sound from inside him, loud enough to be heard from without, and loud enough to suggest the scale of the pain. The agony crashed over him so hard he could not even faint; he only drooled, and still Lee Han did not stop the torture.
"Probably the first time you've tasted this art. I ran Gyeong—my strength—into your muscle and bone."
The day before, on Vulcan, when he passed Gyeong to his disciples, he had taught the art by injecting force directly into the body. A high skill only Lee Han could perform, with his understanding of muscle, bone, and flesh. Had anyone else tried to pass it on, nine out of ten would have been crippled.
Which also meant—
"It's going to hurt. A great deal..."
—that by pouring force in, he could make a man a cripple on purpose.
A vicious method of torture Lee Han had devised entirely on his own.
Don't worry. You suffer the pain of being made a cripple. You don't actually become one.
However.
"Then again, who knows. Drag the pain out long enough, and you might end up an idiot."
"!!...?!...!"
"When you're ready to open your mouth, say so. I'll stop then."
"...!!!!"
"Planning to hold out longer? Fine. Hold out with everything you've got."
"!!?!!!"
"Stubborn bastard. Let's see who wins."
Anyone could see that Roy Bant was thrashing, desperate to vomit up every scrap of information he had—and still he never managed to open his mouth.
—Because the palm was still clamped over it.
And even faced with those pained eyes, desperate and urgent—
"Stubborn little shit. Why won't you open your mouth?"
He only repeated the same line.