Episode 34: The Knight Raised the Switch (2)
Holy Power.
It was one of the first Mysteries the gods had ever granted.
From the ancient civilizations onward, the Sun God and the Moon God had held the greatest sway across the continents of the West and the East, and they held it still. The gods of sea and earth, and the god of the sky, had been reduced to something like old men shut away in a back room, and yet a faithful few still believed. What those ancient gods first passed down to humankind was a flame called Holy Power, and whenever the devotion of the faithful grew more pious, the Mystery that bore that name grew mightier still.
So it was that most of the ancient states were religious states. On the strength of Holy Power they widened their territory, raised up agrarian societies, and laid the very foundations on which a nation stands. But as the abuse of that power for private wealth and private authority grew more and more common, the religious states rotted. And when people looked upon those who cut down the ones who had fouled the names of the gods and fattened their own bellies on divine radiance, they called them the first inquisitors: the Heretic Inquisitors.
The first Heretic Inquisitors were said to have wielded Holy Power as if it were their own hands and feet, and only afterward did anyone realize that the method resembled the principles of magic and of Fighting Art. Even so, a method far easier to use than either of those, and far more powerful, still boasted an overwhelming superiority in the present age.
Holy Law.
A combat art that made use of Holy Power, said to have been founded by some nameless wandering Monk. Convenient as it was, it had its limits, as all things do.
Holy Law is nothing but a shortcut in the end. If one truly wishes to grow strong, what matters is not Holy Law, but letting Holy Power take root in the body, and tempering it without cease.
That, too, had been the wandering Monk's word. Convenient, yes. In the end, though, it was only an expedient that borrowed Holy Power, and with that power one could never defeat the real thing.
And yet hundreds of years later—no, thousands—Holy Law remained one of the temple's great powers, the combat art that stood for the Heretic Inquisitors, and through all those millennia it had never once stopped developing, and developing again. If the founder of Holy Law could see what it had become, he would have had to take back what he had said. The inquisitors' confidence in their own Holy Law ran that deep.
...And now, of course, it was no different.
"We've been hit. Prepare to unfold the Great Holy Law, now!"
"Understood!"
The instant they saw a fellow battle-priest cut down so emptily by the knight, the Heretic Inquisitors snapped their ranks back into order. He had not been a comrade who ought to have fallen so pointlessly, and it had happened in a blink. That meant the knight stood higher than they had predicted.
So be it, then.
"We need only give him a reception suited to his skill."
The Great Holy Law. By rights it called for a gathering of thirty or more who could unfold Holy Law, but each Heretic Inquisitor did the work of ten priests. Nine of them alone were more than enough to bear it, and so they did.
"Bring the iron mace down upon the heretic."
Blessing of the Iron Mace
The Blessing of the Iron Mace. In origin it was a Great Holy Law used to bring down violent, enormous monsters—wyverns, drakes, and their like. Some called it the Trap of the Earth.
And sure enough.
KRRRRRUMBLE!
The moment the Holy Law took hold, a tremendous pressure poured down upon the earth. Rock powdered away like sand. Trees were mashed flat like weeds. It was, quite literally, a Holy Law in which a colossal iron mace falling out of the sky overwhelmed everything around it. Common sense held that even a Captain Class expert could never escape it here, and could never break it...
"Damn. This is a pretty good workout."
"......"
"Look at that. My muscles are actually feeling it. Hey, how long does this thing hold? You can keep it up for two hours, right?"
"Wh... what...?!"
"Answer me, you rude bastard."
Thwack!
"!!!"
In that instant, one of the priests holding the Great Holy Law had his jaw spun clean around and drove his head into the ground. It had happened in a flash, and the priest who looked to be their commander went pale with shock. What in the world—
Thwack!
Crack!
THUD!!
But the absurd sequence did not end with one. One after another, the priests still in the middle of unfolding the Holy Law took blows out of nowhere and were planted face-first in the dirt.
"Y-you! Wh-what did you do?!"
Force banked off the world itself, and struck from every blind angle.
"...What?"
"Don't know it? Then you get hit."
CRUNCH!!
As if the noisy squawking had been grating on him for some time, the knight bestowed one special punch upon the priest, and a fist-print stamped itself with perfect clarity into the exact center of the man's face and caved it in. A fist strike from an entirely different order.
A single fist, and the face gave way.
The priest crumpled where he stood. He had not managed a single proper answer.
Flash!
He had dropped the nuisances in front of him, but there were still those who had not moved. With a burst of tremendous acceleration, Lee Han saw two priests closing from either side to take him. They swung cold awls, already set in the shape of a thrust. Thick killing intent rolled off them, and Lee Han simply let the points come.
They sank in.
"?"
"??"
He had taken the awls head-on. They did not pierce his skin at all. It was as if they had struck a wall.
"Th-the Blessing of Penetration is on these. How...?"
"Ask, and you think I'm going to answer?"
Snap!
Lee Han lightly folded their wrists for them. The joints turned in a direction wrists are not meant to turn, and their eyes flew wide.
"Well, look at you. Better than those guys."
They hadn't screamed, which meant they were fairly tough bastards. And so—
Thuk!
"Since you seem gifted at putting up with pain, try putting up with this."
CRRRRACK!!
"—!!!!"
Force driven into muscle and bone, until the body believed it was coming apart.
Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation. In origin it was nothing but a means of torture, and in the old martial tales it was rarely turned to as an attack, but Lee Han was making thorough use of it as one. More precisely, an understanding of muscle and bone, joined to a sense that was anything but ordinary, had let him refine the thing until it could be used in a real fight. The pain ran weaker than when he tortured a man in earnest, but it still gave about half the effect. Enduring it was probably no small agony.
WHOOOSH!
While he was admiring the piece he had made, Lee Han caught sight of something flying at him. An arrow. A gift from the sniper who had been hurling killing intent from a kilometer and a half away came straight for him. The shaft seemed to possess a will of its own. Lee Han watched it with something like curiosity, and then—
Thock!
He treated a stone like a soccer ball and punted it. The motion looked exceedingly light, almost playful, but the force loaded into the stone was anything but light. Heavy beyond anything further. And destructive beyond anything further.
A stone in place of a spear. Call it a Piercing-One cast, then.
The arrow came apart in the empty air.
The arrow was pulverized where it flew, and this time Lee Han set a hand on a tree.
Crack!
The tree in his grip came straight out of the ground. He was not plucking a flower, and yet it tore free so lightly that it hardly seemed reasonable—but Lee Han's strength had already gone past the merely extraordinary. Anyone who meant to overwhelm him by raw power would have to bring at least a thousand-year-old troll, or an ogre.
He set his feet. A javelin-thrower's stance.
WHOOOOOOSH!
He made his whole body the bow, sprang lightly into a run-up, and after that approach gathered every force he had and delivered it into the tree. He could not vouch for the accuracy. But if the thing planted in the earth, the ground all around it would be devastated, and however desperately a man tried to flee, walking away unhurt would be a difficult business.
FWOOOM!!
It was not Piercing-One Spear. It was not anything. It was simply throwing a tree a long way. Even so, its power and its speed put the arrow from a moment ago to shame, and at a certain instant—
—BOOM!!
Flung far off, it made a sound like a bomb going off.
"...Did that hit?"
Whether it had, he couldn't say. He had thrown it on feel alone.
And into that pause:
"...You ignore even the Blessing of Certain Hit. A truly unreasonable strength. Even if you are no heretic, this power cannot help but look like a heretic's sorcery."
"So you're the last. I thought that presence felt familiar."
"......"
"I let you off once. You weren't expecting me to let you off twice, were you?"
"I am not shameless to that degree."
"Good that you know."
"......"
"Oh. You can take that out."
"You already knew?"
"You're billowing gunpowder smell like that. How would I miss it?"
"...I see."
Click.
The priest he had seen the night before, the one who had carried a scripture and a small bell. From inside that scripture he drew a revolver, and then—
BANG!
He fired.
In this world, a gun amounted to a musket invented for a noble's hunting and little more, and it was hardly a common means of fighting. To begin with, firearms were not even particularly effective against monsters, and if one supposed that a gun might pass into the hands of a monster with a mind of its own, there was no gloomier prospect. There was also the fear that if guns developed, commoners might one day rise in rebellion, and for reasons of that sort the development and spread of firearms in this world had been slow beyond belief.
Bang!
But if one asked whether a slow spread meant the research itself was done carelessly—
KABOOM!!
It did not.
It was only a revolver, and yet the power was considerable. Destructive force enough to make a man wonder if it weren't a rifle meant for anti-materiel work. If it hit, even he, with Diamond Body raised, would not walk away unharmed. This was not power a revolver ought to be able to produce. It was power that had stepped past the laws of physics. Holy Law, most likely, or else a gun made to a special design.
Whoosh!
Lee Han read the bullet's path and slipped it at once. A trained knight's eye answers even to the movement of a round. He thought it would be enough, after that, simply to close in and put the man down. But—
Thud!!
"?"
"As I thought. Bare-handed won't do."
"...No. Do more."
"......"
"I won't kill you, so keep going."
"...Hm."
The opponent's fist—no, his fighting—was of a considerable level. Joint locks and strikes, mixed in the proper measure. Something along the lines of Systema, probably.
Hoh.
This, too, was strange enough that admiration came out of him on its own. He had never expected to see a thing like it in this world. Seeing it, there was a name.
The gun and the empty hand, folded into one art.
A martial art that mixed firearm and technique in the proper measure. The sort he had often seen in films about men who lived by the gun, and if it was used by an expert who could handle a firearm freely and had also learned hand-to-hand to a serious level, there was no art more formidable. Or perhaps, here, it was more accurate to say that the gun was the frightening part.
Bang! Bang! BANG!!
The priest was not high-level in martial arts alone. His shooting was considerable as well. Whether Holy Law was killing the revolver's recoil, he did not waver by a hair, and his accuracy was decent.
"Why do the bullets keep coming?"
"This, too, is Holy Law."
"Wow. That is actually cheating."
"......"
"What's with that face?"
"...I was thinking those are not words for you to say."
"?"
For a moment he felt like asking what nonsense that was, but only for a moment. Lee Han stayed in it with him a little longer, strength held to an appropriate measure, answering with bare-handed fighting and nothing else. If he meant to end it, he could have ended it whenever he pleased. This one's level isn't bad. It felt fresh. The technique was technique, but a fighting art that wove the gun in so neatly stirred his interest and left him greedy to mix hands a while more.
And so.
"One hour."
"?"
"Last one hour, and I'll let you off."
"??"
At that loaded remark the man failed to understand for a while. Around the time thirty minutes had passed...
"...So that was what you meant."
Drip. Drip.
Sweat poured off him like rain, and the priest's whole body shuddered. One hour. Only then did he understand that the words had truly meant he would be spared if he endured a full hour of this, and he shook from head to foot. His stamina was already nearing its limit.
The other man, however—
"You can do it. Get up, you gutless bastard."
"......Are you human?"
Not a single drop of sweat. Even his breathing was peaceful.
"Come on. You can do it!"
"...Do you not think cheering on an enemy is a bit much?"
"Were you enemies?"
"......"
"I just figured you'd come to do a little trick. Hmm..."
"......This is more humiliating than being treated like vermin."
The priest, Pierre, understood. From the very beginning they had not even been treated as enemies by this knight. They had been toys.
Understanding that, he moved.
Click.
"Then I would rather die."
Pierre set the muzzle to his own brow and pulled the trigger, as if he would settle everything with death.
......Except.
"No you don't."
"......"
"Where do you think you're running?"
"......"
Watching the fired bullet spin between Lee Han's thumb and forefinger, Pierre, this time, truly lost anything he might have said.
And Lee Han—
"This bastard's skill and talent are fine, but his head is rotten clean through! What kind of piece of shit is this!"
He spat rage the way a dragon does when its reverse scale has been touched, and he picked up a stick that had been rolling on the ground. It was nothing but a shabby length of wood, yet the moment he lifted it the thing took on a vitality he could not have named, and a hardness like iron.
"You rotten-headed bastard! You're taking exactly one thousand!"
"......"
"Get down."
"What?"
"I said drop and push, you rotten bastard!!"
After that, with no regard for the man's opinion, Lee Han swung the rod without end.
WHAAAAACK!
Pierre's mind flew clean out of him.
......And afterward, whenever he lost consciousness, water was poured over him until he woke. When he looked about to die, a potion was poured over him. When his stamina gave out, he was fed. And the switch was swung without end.
Without end.
Pierre kept fainting under an intense pain he could not grow used to, no matter how it repeated, and every time he woke he had to watch the switch come down on him. As if he had fallen into a hell where pain went on and never stopped.
And for four days, while he was beaten, Pierre thought.
......This knight kept his own word with a useless thoroughness.
One thousand. Just as the knight had boasted, across four days he was beaten a full thousand times in the end. How could he know that?
"Assistant. How many this bastard got left?"
"Um... you've hit him up through four hundred and eighty?"
"The number's solid?"
"You were writing it on the blackboard while you hit him."
"There's so damn many of them to hit, I'm getting mixed up."
"Th-that could happen, yes."
"Oh, he's up. All right. Just five hundred and twenty more and you're done. Assistant, count them exact."
"Yes......"
......Because, kindly enough, every time he fainted and every time he woke, he was told how many remained.