EP.29 – King Kong and the Hybrid Clash (10) / Revised
It began the way a light probing exchange does, with jabs thrown just to feel the other man out. Nothing but light punches. The result those punches produced, however, was anything but light.
BOOM!
Could you even call that a light jab?
BOOM! CRACK! KRA-BOOM—!
The force called artillery to mind. And every time blows of that magnitude collided, every time they hammered each other's guard, a mad ripping of the air rang out without pause.
WHUMP!
Even when those shell-laden strikes landed, neither man seemed to take the slightest damage. Both of them were bare-bodied, and still, each time their fists met, the only sound was the dull thump of something as elastic as a tire.
Huuuk—!
Perhaps the light probing had grown dull. Maximus was the first to go on the offensive.
KUUUNG!
A mere change in motion was enough to blast out a crushing fist-pressure. Brush that fist, and some men would have had to lay down their lives. Common sense said you dodged, or you ran.
Krrk.
Unfortunately, he had not the slightest intention of dodging.
Lee Han took that monstrous pressure head-on, answered with a blow of his own, and stamped down into a rooted stance as he absorbed it. The ground caved beneath him. He locked his whole body rigid, and then—
KRAAAANG!
—he caught the punch with no guard at all.
"?!"
Maximus was startled. Part of it was simply that he had never, in all his life, seen a man neither dodge nor block one of his blows.
THUD!
"...That hurt."
The punch had landed square, and in the same instant Lee Han's fist had slammed precisely into Maximus's flank. Heavy. It was like a great hammer driven straight into his side. An ordinary man would have had every organ in him rupture on the spot.
"You don't look hurt at all."
"Haha, I mean it. It hurts. Shameful, really. You weathered my blow, and here I am whining. What a sight."
"...Weathered it, he says."
Lee Han wore a bitter smile. He had endured it with Diamond Body, but the spot that had been hit still buzzed and tingled. Was this what it would feel like to take a charging bull dead-center in the chest?
Heavy.
The impact was more than even Diamond Body could disperse—the same Diamond Body that shrugged off blades, spears, even arrows with ease. It hurt, yes. It was also absurd.
This man took it without even using a technique.
Lee Han had endured by deploying a defensive art. Maximus had eaten the blow on the raw performance of his body alone. That punch had not been a light jab. Lee Han had thrown it meaning to knock him down, and the man only played at being a little sore while standing as solid as ever. A mad body, in the most literal sense. If there was ever a man you could call strong by birth, it was this one.
Who was it, in my last life? They said even a world champion's fist was nothing but a massage to a beast like a bear.
The example came to him unbidden, and he decided it fit. To a lion or a bear, a human punch or kick felt like a cat or a puppy thrashing. Ordinary attacks would not work on this one. Only full power. Only a blow thrown with every last ounce he could muster would knock that man down. Not a light jab.
What matters is one heavy shot...
Then how would he answer this?
Lee Han threw another strike.
Fun! This is insanely fun!!
Maximus felt a huge surge of excitement, and a thrill ran through him. The weight of the blow was weight enough, but the man had taken Maximus's own strike as if it were nothing!
For an instant it felt like hitting plate armor.
No—perhaps harder than that. Would you believe the hand that struck hurt more than the man who was struck? A wondrous method, no question. He didn't know what it was, but his opponent had clearly mastered some uncanny art: an art that hardened the body, in an instant, until it was like plate armor. Hadn't the rumors said he made flowers bloom with a sword? Which meant the uncanny arts were only just beginning.
Heh heh heh!
Maximus couldn't stop the excitement, or the laughter. He was looking forward to this. He had confirmed the man's strength, and that mystery was unfamiliar and wondrous both. A true difficult opponent. And that was exactly why.
He's all the more worth it.
A duel was supposed to be like this. A violent collision with an opponent as uncertain as a trial, a man you weren't even sure you could beat. Through that, you felt that you were alive.
Show me. What else are you hiding!
Thud.
Maximus advanced again, toward the man who might receive his full strength—or perhaps hand him defeat. And sure enough.
Huuuk!
PUNG!
"??"
As if answering his expectations—no, surpassing them—the man bestowed upon him a method even more uncanny.
......Maximus's head snapped around. The opponent's fist had never even touched him.
"They call it Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox."
"!!"
"You're probably going to be busy."
Fist-energy banks off every obstacle and hunts the blind angles—front, back, left, right, above, and below.
With that kind warning, the man threw his fists in the same light one-two as before. Maximus had only to block the same way, and yet—
WHAAANG!
Once again he failed to block, and had no choice but to take the blow clean. An invisible strike. A dizziness and bewilderment that made him wonder if a ghost's hand were on him. Fist-blows that scrambled the senses, and a ghost hand, toyed with him without mercy. Maximus felt as if a ghost had him spellbound, and he admitted that his senses had fallen into confusion.
Is he throwing fist-pressure? In any direction he likes?
It came from front, back, left, and right without distinction. Even—
KANG!
"...Remarkable. How in the world do you do a thing like that?"
—from below, and from above. A trick that casually surpassed the laws of physics, flying in from every direction at once. Maximus could only be astonished.
"I'll teach you later."
"Haha. Stingy of you."
WHUMP!
Maximus's body went flying.
Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox. In a sense, it was the ancestral form of the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist.
If the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist was the knack of simply driving force in a straight line, Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox demanded extremely fine control of that force. Lee Han's fist-energy went out with a huuk and rebounded off the obstacles around them, hunting the blind angles his opponent could neither react to nor even see.
Ordinarily, a technique like this required mathematical calculation. You had to gauge the angle and direction of the fist-energy in real time. Swing it wrong, and you might strike yourself, or an ally. But—
THWACK!
"You don't miss."
"You could stand to look like it hurts."
Lee Han's senses did the work. Senses it would not be too much to call super-intuition solved every one of those calculations by feel. A sensory art on the level of Mystery. And through the precision of the technique and a proper distribution of force, he threw blows the other man could see coming and still could not stop.
A fist shot out with a huuk, and with it another move of Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox. It was like a bullet of compressed air bursting, and such blows pounded the opponent without rest. Fist-energy that gave the illusion his arms had multiplied from two to eight, and on top of that a move that ignored reach entirely. It would have been no surprise if even a large monster had already been pounded flat into a hamburger patty.
And yet.
Krk!
"Oho. I see. So this is how you block it?"
"......"
The man didn't so much as flinch. Worse, he was starting to react. Lee Han had brought the art out less than three minutes ago, and already Maximus was trying to counter. Of course—
WHAAACK!
"Ah. I was mistaken."
He still couldn't block them all. Even so, Lee Han—who held the advantage—let out an empty laugh. The man's superhuman reaction speed was one thing, but...
Damn, but his body is filthy tough!
Facing a body so unreasonably hard, the hollow laugh came of its own accord. Who the hell was built this solid?
Does it make any damn sense that the hand doing the hitting is the one that hurts?
Lee Han was confident his own body was solid, but this one was in another class. In his own case, endless training was part of it, but he had also built his toughness by being beaten on by ill-tempered Aura Users, and he had produced Diamond Body so he would never have to be beaten like that again. This man was simply strong from birth. Skin, muscle, bone—everything that made up his body was tough beyond measure.
If Lee Han's body wore an armor of irrational muscle, as if iron chains had been bundled together, then Maximus's body was adamant itself. Born a raw diamond, then cut and worked until he took on a still more ideal form. Which was why this wasn't easy. Petty little attacks would never simply punch through.
In that case—
Then something big ought to do it!!
KWAANG. A small explosion went off inside Lee Han's body. He stacked his internal energy and dragged power together in real time.
Internal energy compressed in real time. A bomb of gathered force, loaded into the blow as it is thrown.
Originally, this was not a technique you were supposed to use in the middle of a real fight. The enormous concentration it demanded meant he might be taken down in the attempt. But Lee Han used it. Not because he was some muscle-headed brawler...
That man won't dodge.
Absurd as it was, in this moment Lee Han trusted his opponent. A certainty that the outrageous man would never interrupt his technique. Why? Why did he trust a man he had barely met? The people of the North knew the answer. Any rival who had dueled him even once would have sympathized with Lee Han and said it like this.
WHOOOOM!
"Haha! Now that momentum is properly threatening!"
And sure enough. Even amid an ominous surge of force, Maximus was hearty—as if this moment were more enjoyable than any other, as if the thrill of a technique he had never seen were stirring his chest and leaving him perfectly satisfied. Lee Han watched him from the corner of his eye.
...He really is a strange one.
And he launched the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist with Stacked Energy loaded into it.
Stacked Energy rides the straight-line fist. Weight and detonation overlap into a single blow.
FWOOOSH!
The harmony of the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist and Stacked Energy was not a simple matter of adding one to the other. The fist-energy of the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist, which already drove a punch in a straight line, was powerful enough on its own. Now he was throwing the bomb called Stacked Energy along with it. The moment weight and violent explosive force overlapped, no body, however tough, could withstand a clean hit. Not so long as the opponent was, in the end, a primate made of flesh. Lee Han finally expected to see that proud face crumple.
But.
"...Ah. I see. Now I understand. So this is how you do it."
Hwuuuk!
For an instant Lee Han wondered if something had gone wrong in his own head.
......That bastard?
Maximus, as if reflected in a mirror—no, taking the exact same posture as Lee Han—astonishingly unfolded it.
The same form. A fiercer force, like lightning, loaded into the blow.
HWA-AAK!!
KR-RUMBLE.
Something like Lee Han's own. No—carrying a force even fiercer, like lightning.
Fuck. That bastard was playing dumb and deceiving people all along...
That was Lee Han's impression as he watched the two forces collide.
GUGUGUGUNG—!
Kra-crack....
The Tunnels—the Underground World with a hundred years of history—were collapsing. The blast of the scrolls. The thrashing of the Mother Worm. It was already a problem that disasters of that scale had struck one after another in a single day, and beyond even that, Lv. 8—heroes a certain boy would have called the monstrous, god-defying champions of an age—had collided. With that alone, it was only natural that the Underground World, taking a tremendous shock, should come down. Every clash burst like an artillery shell. If the place had held anyway, the Tunnels would have been impressive indeed. But unfortunately, the Tunnels were frail.
Probably...
"Instructor, I figure this place comes down in thirty minutes at the outside. So I'm running first."
"...Go on. You've had a rough time of it."
"......I'd like to say no, just to be polite, but... I really can't."
Taechang was a wreck. He had been in the middle of two monstrous titans fighting. It would have been stranger if he looked fine. Anyone else, after an ordeal like that, would have cursed on the spot and cut ties in a single stroke. Taechang, unlike the kids these days, was a good and diligent man of generous character.
Rustle...
Even after taking the damage, he wore an unconcerned expression and asked the man jammed into the wall.
"Instructor, I'm only asking just in case, but don't you want to come out with me? However I look at it, what you're doing right now seems pointless."
...Still, like the kids these days, his tone had a bite. But not a word of it was wrong.
"...I know."
That all of this was pointless. In truth, the two knights no longer had a reason to fight. Whatever their reasons, their purpose had been the unsound crowd in the Tunnels—that is, to catch the cultists and wring information out of them. In that sense the ending had been a little hollow, but they had found the ones who proved the cult existed, and they had even succeeded in killing the colossal Mother Worm being raised in the Tunnels. As a bonus, they had also captured someone who looked like a former coworker and a high-ranking officer of the cult.
Now the profitable course was to pool what they knew, or else report the situation to their respective superiors and bring it to an end.
KURURUNG!
All the more so in an underground space that might collapse at any moment. Unless they wanted to be buried in the Tunnels and die, getting out even now was the rational, wise thing. And the two knights were not fools who failed to understand even that much. If anything, they were sharper than most.
Only—
"Strange, isn't it? Just for this moment, I want to act like a fool."
"Yes?"
At the sudden coming-out, Derek blinked. He wondered what on earth that was supposed to mean, but then he heard the sincerity that followed.
"I don't think running is shameful. I'm not the type who likes fighting with his life on the line, either. ...But strangely, I don't want to run in front of that man."
"...Is it the will to win?"
"Ah. Probably?"
"What kind of answer is that..."
The answer was vague. Even Lee Han himself seemed awkward with the idea that he possessed this kind of competitive spirit. He didn't want to lose. He didn't want to run in front of the Champion of the North. He wanted to break him. That will to win had become a fighting spirit, and that fighting spirit was making a fool of him. It would not let him run.
KRAK!
When he rose, the wall collapsed again, and pain climbed his cheek. He must have been hit rather hard.
"That hurts..."
Krk!
"Haha! You flew a long way. Well now. I never once thought my waist lacked for strength, but this is an ugly showing. Kahaha!"
Lee Han shook his head at Maximus, who, far off, was smashing out of the wall just as he had.
"A stupidly solid bastard! Is that even human?"
"That's hardly something you of all people should be saying, Instructor..."
"Next to him, I'm a gentleman!"
"...You just seem like two of a kind."
Lee Han ignored the nagging and shook his body out again. The ache was slowly healing. Bruises of this degree wouldn't even count as wounds, not for that man and not for him. Toward Lee Han, as he started forward once more—
"I don't think it's a bad thing. Having an opponent you don't want to lose to. It feels like you're the same kind of person I am, Instructor, so it's familiar."
"......That so."
"Yes. Which is why."
Shing.
"Win, if you can. If you're going to play the fool anyway, winning at least looks cool."
"...Ha."
Derek put a sword in his hand. When had the kid even held onto it? Before Lee Han could ask, he shouldered Number Four and slipped away.
"...Right. That's how it should be."
Lee Han answered the retreating figure a beat late and gripped the sword hard. Right. Even if he was going to play the fool.
A fool who wins is the cool one.
Lee Han smiled—more freely than Maximus.