King Kong and the Hybrid Clash (2)
A torture whose very name meant the parting of flesh from bone.
That vicious art dragged on for more than thirty minutes.
Bone and flesh had not truly been separated, of course. Even so, for the man enduring pain to match it, those thirty minutes must have felt like thirty years. Roy Bant, worn down past all wearing, was no better than a half-corpse, his life shortened until death at any moment would have surprised no one.
It was a wretched sight beyond words. There had been no other way.
"Tough bastard. You wouldn't believe how tight he kept that mouth..."
"It wasn't tight. You forced him so he couldn't talk, didn't you, Senior?"
"Watch it."
"......"
At the warning in that stern tone, Jord shut his mouth. He had watched the torture in real time—muscle and bone twisting into grotesque shapes, then wrenching back into place—and he had no stomach for standing against the man who had done it. It was cruelty fit to leave a scar on the mind, the sort of scene that explained why Torture Technicians went mad.
And yet the man himself stood unshaken. What he did reeked of madness, but he was colder than anyone, like a laborer who had simply finished a required task. Watching him, Jord felt a single bead of sweat slide down his spine.
This senior... he really is thorough.
Jord could not claim to understand the senior knight completely, but he felt he had grasped him, if only on the surface. A man with no forgiveness for an enemy, and no limit to how cold—or how unscrupulous—he became toward anyone he had decided was one. Someone would spit the bullshit line, Isn't that obvious? The people who knew, knew. Knowing a thing and doing it were as far apart as heaven and earth.
Even if the day comes when I have to fight him again, it'll be for the sake of learning. He's not the kind of senior I ever want to face as an enemy...
In more ways than one.
While Jord was deepening his understanding of the man called Lee Han, Jake—who had already spent three years living with that same man—looked unmoved.
"Still, we got lucky. He knew a lot more than I thought."
No. Not unmoved. His face was purely businesslike, without so much as a scrap of pity for the man on the ground.
"...Unexpected. You looked like the sort who'd be furious over a thing like this."
Aren, paler than Jord—no, past pale, having already vomited up everything inside him—flinched at this other face of Jake, the one man he had taken for sane, and the words slipped out before he could stop them. How could a knight, prisoner or not, commit something so cruel and barbaric as torture? He had expected that sort of principled, normal-person objection. To Aren's bewilderment, Jake answered.
"He is an enemy threatening Pendragon. Of course I know the act violates both human decency and knightly honor. But a man who is a knight must not hesitate to swing his sword for the safety and order of the kingdom and its people, even if the enemy calls him a devil for it. I simply refuse to spend my feelings on a man who would become Pendragon's enemy, Your Highness the Eighth Prince. So I do not think he did wrong. The kingdom can still be at peace because there are men like him who do the work someone must do, and dirty their own hands doing it."
"......"
"If the two of us sit ill with you, I recommend you return to the Royal Capital even now. I'll persuade him."
"......"
Until this moment, Jake had shown him respect and still called him Knight Captain, or Sir, without fail. Now, for the first time, he had used the words Eighth Prince. If Aren failed to grasp what that meant, he would have been a fool in the truest sense. It meant Jake was treating him not as a knight, but as royalty. It was nothing less than a notice to go live as a hothouse flower. And to quit playing at knighthood.
Hearing it—
Grind.
If that did not wound his pride, he could not even call himself a man, royalty or otherwise!
"Watch your tongue. I am not the Eighth Prince. I am the proud First Knight Captain of the Silver Lion. Know your place, Jake Parman!"
Aren bit his lip until it bled and raised his voice in fury. Jake only nodded, unmoved.
"...My apologies, Sir Aren."
"Damn it!"
The humiliation was plain on Aren's face, and he could not master his anger. But that anger was not aimed at Jake. He was angry at himself, for looking pathetic in a moment like this, for acting pathetic.
I am a knight of the Silver Lion!
Repeating it to himself, Aren cracked his eyes toward Jake. The man had snapped him awake, yes, but the provocation aimed at him was hardly pleasant.
"...I think I see it now. Why a man like you is friends with that monster."
"Was that an insult?"
"You think it's a compliment?!"
"Hmm. An insult, then."
"You—!"
Aren realized that Jake's courtesy now struck him as thoroughly offensive.
"...So Senior Jake provokes people like that. And it's infuriating, too."
Even Jord would not have kept his pride intact after hearing words like those. From a third party's view, Aren was dancing in the palm of Jake's hand, and Jord could only shake his head at this unfamiliar side of a senior knight he had thought nothing but simple and decent. The needling tone reminded him, somehow, of someone. And that someone was...
"Tsk. He used to be a softie. After a few missions with me he saw too much he shouldn't have, and his personality got a little twisted. I'm telling you, soldiering warps a man's character."
"......"
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Ah, it's nothing..."
"...Those eyes are downright insolent."
"Truly, I didn't mean anything by it."
"Hmmm..."
"......"
Jord held his silence, closed his mouth, and looked away. How could he possibly say it?
Senior... no matter how I look at it, you seem more the culprit than the army.
...that.
Jord had the wise sense to know his mouth was the root of disaster, and he protected himself with silence. It was the moment a working man's essential passive unlocked.
"Th-they approached me one day..."
The information Roy Bant spat out named not one person, but several.
"I don't know how long they've been in the Tunnels. What is certain is that it's been ten years at the least."
Asked why he thought so—
"...They used the Tunnels as if the place were their own home, and they knew the layout far too well. They knew secrets, one after another, that even the soldiers who manage the Tunnels don't."
A detention pit that was hell and an execution ground to others was, to them, their own bedroom. Which was to say they had completely mapped a structure as tangled as an anthill, a maze in which no path could be known. And this, in tunnels whose layout shifted constantly because of the worms. They had clearly been there a long time. But ten years was a story too hard to believe—
"There are buildings, and farms. In other words, there are livable facilities inside the Tunnels."
Hard to believe, and yet they had built dwellings of their own here and there throughout the Tunnels. Facilities of a kind that could not exist unless someone had lived there for at least ten years. This, too, was information difficult to credit. No matter how rarely the soldiers entered the Tunnels, no matter how indifferent they were, could they really fail to notice dwellings being raised?
When he twitched his hand again, suspicion in the motion—
"Eek! P-please believe me! I-it's true, I tell you! I-I'm only saying what I saw!!"
Roy Bant wailed, as if he never wanted to suffer that pain again. And, thrashing like a man in his death struggle—
"I-I don't know who they are! Only that they were organized! They won over the strong ones in the Tunnels! Most of them seemed to be looking for people with some unjust grievance, or else people who held anger toward Pendragon—no, further than that, toward nobles and royalty! They even had an antidote from who knows where, and they restored people's Fighting Art! I saw them teach Fighting Art to ignorant farmers!!"
He poured the information out with everything he had, and what came out was no ordinary story.
"I-I was the same! I was a low-rank soldier out of Britannia. I was thrown in here for looting civilians, and I was only waiting for the day I died! B-but they taught a man like me Fighting Art, and how to fight. Th-the elixir you took from my pocket is the same, sir! It has side effects, but it raises fighting-energy! I-it's true! Please believe me!"
......Information even harder to believe.
Two years, he had said. That was how long the bastard had been imprisoned in the Tunnels. A soldier who had not even known Fighting Art—a grown man in his prime, at that—had learned it and climbed to that level in two years. It was no mediocre level. Clearly stronger than the Silver Lion's half-baked knights, and clearly stronger than the First Knight Captain who led those half-baked knights. And in a mere two years. When it took at least ten years to finish a knight who could pull his own weight, it was nothing short of astonishing.
"M-my mission was only to recruit people who resented the nobility. Y-you were the same! I knew that if I recruited you, advancement was guaranteed, and I thought I could get more of the elixir, so... ghk—!"
In the middle of spilling what he knew, Roy Bant thrashed in pain again. The man listening had used that dreadful method on him once more, and Roy Bant, his face full of injustice—
"W-why!?"
A protest: he was giving up everything, so why this? To that protest—
"Because you're lying to my face. Looting wasn't all you did, was it?"
"!!?"
"I thought so. You talk exactly like a liar."
"Gaaaaah—!!"
Roy Bant. He was not merely a looter. He was a criminal of the worst order, one who had committed rape as well. Having confirmed it, Lee Han cast a cold look on him.
"I've always been good at sorting out trash."
And he simply went on with the torture, unruffled. Not to drag out information. Only to make the man suffer.
And so, having heard most of what there was to hear, the knights wore hard faces.
"This elixir. No matter how you look at it, it's that, isn't it?"
"Yes. I'm afraid it seems so."
"Hmm..."
In one corner, Roy Bant had fainted, and the knights could see the symptoms of addiction on him. And looking at that impossible growth...
"This was made from monster flesh. A hundred percent, I'd say."
Monster flesh. To a human it was no different from poison, a poison that killed the instant it was swallowed. If an animal ate it, common knowledge said the beast mutated and became a monster.
...And yet. Did you know? Think it through.
"Humans are animals too, and this proves it nicely."
Among humans who ingested monster flesh, a few occasionally survived. And those who survived sometimes gained monstrous strength, a power of regeneration, and an exceptional capacity to learn. A blessing, in a word.
But.
"Most of those who survive go mad. They anger easily, kill easily. Their humanity wears away, bit by bit."
Proof, perhaps, that blessing and curse did not sit so far apart. In that sense, monster flesh was surely a terrible curse and a nightmare at once.
"I've heard of it. 'Demon-person sickness.' You become a Demon Person..."
"...According to the royal records, the last Demon Person was found thirty years ago. In a single month that one displayed force enough to overwhelm a hundred soldiers, and was put down only after ten knights took the field. That's what I heard."
The end of one who survived eating monster flesh was always the same. A monster's instinct, in the end, was to kill people. And the instinct of a human who had become a monster—a Demon Person—was likewise to kill people, and further still—
"They say they even turn to eating their own kind."
"Ugh!"
Cases of men who no longer recognized their own children, and ate their wives and sons. The knights, who had heard such stories more than once in their student days, looked at the elixir with horror. Lee Han rolled it across his palm and gave it a sunken stare.
"...Seeing he hasn't completely lost his humanity, this elixir must have stripped away as much of that side effect as they could. But even that will have a limit."
Lee Han was certain. An unpleasant stench rose off the elixir as he looked at it. A small amount of flesh was mixed in—small enough that a human would not die from swallowing it.
"They must have experimented like mad. How many people did they kill?"
It was clearly a drug made only after they had learned, as far as they could, the limits of human immunity and tolerance. No. This could not even be called a medicine, or a poison. A time bomb that might go off at any moment! Sooner or later, while they were taking it, something would go wrong. And to develop a time bomb like this, at minimum...
"They used humans by the tens of thousands as test subjects. Ha! Madmen—!"
It was Jake who spoke, and he spoke with certainty. He had caught Illegal Mages alongside Lee Han from time to time, and had witnessed experiments of this kind often enough. He was no expert, but he could come close. Which made it all the more horrific. How could any human being do such a thing? Madness, obsession, and a malice without end—he could feel them all.
"It doesn't matter anymore whether these bastards are the Blood Cross or whatever else they call themselves. We have to wipe them out now. If we don't, what comes later will be worse."
"Agreed."
A group with malice on this scale. And this same group possessed a drug that could turn people into Demon Persons—no, into half-Demon Persons. On top of that, they were teaching those people High Internal Art. How many of them were there? If there were a thousand—no, even a hundred—that alone would be threat enough. An enemy threatening the kingdom. That simple fact was what mattered, and the knights fixed their attention on Lee Han's mouth. And he, as if answering what they expected—
All he put in his mouth was an answer so clean it was exhilarating.