King Kong and the Hybrid Collide (6)
The firestorm rolled over the prisoners. Burned men spilled across the ground in heaps, and in the first spasm of chaos they tangled with one another and went down in droves.
Anyone else would have writhed under the flames and the seared flesh and begged for the pain to stop. These, regrettably, were not ordinary men.
"I—I'll kill you!"
They were men into whom hatred and rage toward Pendragon had been poured as a matter of course. Murderers to begin with, and the same hard cases who had fought the worms for the right to stay alive.
So they did not suffer under the attack that had buried them. They got angry. Wanting revenge on whoever had hurt them was simply their instinct.
And so—
"There he is!!"
"After him!!"
The prisoners who tore themselves out of the flames poured after Pendragon's knight like hunting dogs gone rabid.
"...We're going after him too."
The man who had eaten that same blow hauled himself upright, clamping a hand over a nose that poured blood like a waterfall. His eyes were bloodshot red, and full of the will to kill.
"Fourth Apostle, are you all right?"
"I'm fine. More importantly, get after him at once. I'll recover for a moment, then follow."
"......Understood."
A sharp rush of wind, and the black-clad figures were gone. The man called the Fourth Apostle steadied his breath.
"So he knows about the Black Moon...."
He ground his teeth, picturing the knight who had been piecing the order together. One more reason the man could not be allowed to leave alive.
"I don't know who you are. I will kill you."
Even if he had to offer himself, and every last one of them with him, as a sacrifice!
This was not—he told himself—the fury of a man humiliated and flung aside. It was for the greater cause...!
...Drip.
The blood still would not stop.
Fist-pressure crashed down over the pack charging in.
Whump, whump, whump!
"Aaaagh!"
"Ghk!?"
"?!?"
They never even knew what had hit them. They simply tumbled across the floor. For men meeting the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist for the first time, it would have been easy to believe a ghost had struck them—and the mistake was an understandable one.
"A-an invisible hand!"
"H-he's that far away—how...!?"
"Pendragon's knight commands ghosts!!"
To seize thirty paces and fifty at will, and set the fist-pressure exactly where he meant it, was truly a ghost's touch. The unexpected terror made the prisoners falter plainly, and every time they did, Lee Han did not hesitate. A hesitating face got a kick. A hesitating leg got broken.
The more of them lost their heads, the better it was for him. That only made the breakthrough easier.
But not all of them froze.
Thoom!
"Don't get scared—charge! Look how many of us there are!"
"Take a knife in the gut and a knight dies the same as a knight's grandpa, you idiots! Stab—!!"
"Hold the formation! Don't break, you morons!!"
As if to prove how many of them were used to real fighting, some threw themselves in at once, unfazed even by the unfamiliar art the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist had just shown them. A few, as though they had commanded men before, began to press him by degrees. Others simply lunged.
Those ones, of course, he broke in the most literal sense.
Crack!
"Move."
Crunch!
There was no mercy in the hand. For an instant his fists moved in a blur, from the philtrum down to the center of the chest. He struck the body's vital points, dropped them with almost casual ease, and then the edge of his hand drove into a flank like a harpoon—
Crack-crack!!
The moment he seized and tore, ribs collapsed. Shattered bone drove into organs, and prisoners went down one after another. Even if they lived, the injuries would cripple them for the rest of their lives.
Someone might have called the hand cruel. Lee Han did not hesitate.
They reek of rot.
The stench coming off them. Was it only the filth of men who never washed? No. This was a rot a nose trained by experience could pick out—the kind that clung to spell-mongers commonly called Illegal Mages, or, failing that, to illegal slavers. Cancers on society, with no guilt in them at all. Men who felt pleasure, even a thrill, in harming others rather than repenting what they had done.
That stench was thick here, and Lee Han saw no reason to spare his hands.
I don't have time to waste feeling on trash that won't help anyone by staying alive.
His eyes went dull as river stones. He was not treating them as people. He was treating them as vermin to be cleared. Even as he broke through, he did not hesitate to hit them and break them, steadily. Block his path and he smashed them. Resist, and they paid more than that. He advanced on that principle, again and again—!
Crack-crack-crack!!
"I-Instructor, I think we're out now?"
"......"
"Instructor...?"
"...Feels like I lost my head for a minute."
"Y-you were locked in. To a frightening degree..."
"Hoo..."
......And at some point, nothing stood in his way.
Derek swallowed dryly. The height of focus Lee Han had just shown, and the violence born of it, had been something else entirely.
A Terminator would be less scary than that.
Movement like a machine clearing inanimate objects. The instant he confirmed they were criminals, mercy left his hands, and the motion only grew more precise, more powerful. Overwhelming. If a reaper existed, Derek thought, it might look like that.
The Adamant Monk trait must have run wild....
The seven traits Lee Han possessed—no, by now it was surely eight or nine. Among them, Adamant Monk, boasting the highest level, was, he guessed, a trait of the good alignment. Which also meant it was sensitive to humans who had committed sin. Against the wicked, the trait would show even more of its strength. And if the sensory traits he already carried added their synergy on top of that, Adamant Monk would strike harder still. That was the advantage of traits linking together.
If even Spell Butcher linked in and amplified the power of the traits... the Instructor would bring out the greatest potential of anyone at his level.
As he had just confirmed.
Derek shivered. He was suddenly glad they were on the same side. Watching the man handle the prisoners had been so intense it edged into fear.
"I'd like to see your System Window one more time, Instructor. I wonder how much it's changed...."
"Traits. Give me a break. This isn't even a game."
"Haha, later I'll write the stats down and show you."
"From the look of you, the skill cooldown's come all the way back around?"
"Haha..."
Derek didn't particularly hide it. Just as Lee Han said, Status Appraisal could be used again. More than that—
I can use it five times in a row now.
Whether because he had been putting in his own effort and stacking experience, his skills had been raised across the board, and he was feeling the benefit. He was especially pleased that Status Appraisal could be fired five times in succession, and that the cooldown had dropped from three months to two weeks.
Which was why—
"Check the traits, and we'll see your new growth tree, Instructor. Traits are potential, after all."
"Hhh. I feel like I've become a game character...."
Lee Han looked thoroughly unenthusiastic. Still, if it would point him toward the direction he ought to grow, he could live with it. Game character or not, the thought of learning a potential even he hadn't known swelled into something like anticipation. He was looking forward to later.
...Of course.
"That's if we get out in one piece."
"Yes?"
"...Something nasty seems to be coming."
"Instructor...?"
"Get ready to run first. What's coming isn't the manageable sort."
"!?"
Lee Han's face hardened fast. A powerful presence was crawling into the range of his senses. It didn't even bear comparison with the Fourth.
"So it wasn't only that sloppy one after all."
"......"
Derek had never seen him wind his tension up like this.
Wh-what? Who's coming?
On instinct he unfolded Crisis Detection. He wanted to know what was approaching.
Not long after—
BEEEEEEEEEEP!!
"!!!?"
Derek jolted in shock and went straight down on his back. A tremendous alarm slammed through his mind and shook his head.
"Ghhk...!"
"I told you to get ready to run. Did I tell you to pull some weird stunt?"
"I-Instructor! S-something enormous is coming. M-maximum Lv. 8...!!"
Derek was aghast. Once, at Lee Han's senses, which had caught it while they were still roughly ten kilometers apart. Twice, at an enemy that could throw its presence across ten kilometers. And last—
Are you insane!? It's falling!
The enemy was dropping even now, smashing through the floor of the Tunnels, closing the distance in an instant. Which meant the other side had noticed them as well, and was coming here. Derek was horrified and tried to evade at once, but—
"—Too late."
Lee Han knew it in his gut. Whether they dodged or not, the opponent was already going to come down exactly on top of them. And a thing like that would not be easily shaken off.
In that case.
Boom!!
If I can't shake it off, I only have to crush it.
Lee Han clenched his fist and gathered the strength of his whole body into it.
Gyeong. A means of using every force the body held—muscle, bone, tendon, weight. He was the founder of the only Gyeong in this world, and so his was not merely a different level from the students'. It was a different order.
Creak. Strain.
The one and only master of Gyeong did more than gather the strength spread through every corner of his body into a single place. He stacked that strength.
A deep hum rose.
There was still time before the opponent arrived, and that time let him draw still more force together. Lee Han strained until the veins stood out, gathering power to the limit, until at last—
Thoom!
Thooom!
Explosions sounded from inside his body. He had entered the preparation to detonate the force: nothing that deserved to be called a technique, only the chain-detonation of simple, brutish strength. He was doing something that would already have burst another man's body apart, and he endured the pain as he slowly prepared to extend his fist.
A technique he used because he trusted the flesh he had—the same trust that had let him try to land even a single blow on Baltar.
If one insisted on a name—
The greatest single blow Lee Han could presently bring forth.
And in the instant that strike was completed—
BOOOOM!
The ceiling collapsed, and the thing appeared.
"Uahahahaha!!!"
It arrived wearing a mad peal of laughter. Just as Lee Han had already known an enemy was there, it had known him, and it had long since dropped into an attacking stance aimed his way. With a crushing presence to match the momentum pouring off him, the enemy extended a fist.
Crack. Rumble.
The moment the two men's momentum and force collided, the whole area was already devastated. There was no longer even a place to run. And so, an instant before they crashed together, their eyes met, and they turned killing intent on each other—
"Huh?"
"Hm?"
......It was a face he knew.
Surely....
Wasn't that Maximus?
—BOOM!!
A fist carrying the explosive force of a living volcano met a fist like lightning falling out of the sky, and the collision of the two men at last—
RUMBLE!!
—raised an earthquake.