A Knight Does Not Forgive the Golden Sun (5)
The sword that had spread its plum blossoms crumbled away like sand. Its sword-force was spent to the last.
He did not regret it. The thing had belonged to that western assassin anyway.
The completion isn't bad.
The Plum Blossom Sword, as he had first learned it, dragged a crushing fatigue in after every use. What Lee Han had just unfolded was as different from the day before as a chicken from a duck.
And what sort of difference was that?
Being able to fly is a hell of a difference.
A faint change, and an enormous one. Lee Han no longer tired simply because he had used the Plum Blossom Sword a few times. More precisely, he could refill stamina and mental strength as fast as he spent them. If a thing like that was possible, it was probably because—
The training meant something.
If that Taechang brat had been watching, he would have launched into a lecture about traits that guarded body and mind, Adamant Monk and Indomitable and the rest. Lee Han habitually strained out half of that game-stat nonsense. He was living in the real world. His strength, his stamina, his skill were nothing but the products of effort, not the skills of some game, and the Plum Blossom Sword was no different. He had trained like a man possessed, he had grown since yesterday, and so he could simply bring it out again and again—faster, and sharper, than the first time.
About twenty times?
Certain he could loose the Plum Blossom Sword a comfortable twenty times over, Lee Han raised the stolen blade and swung.
A decent blade. Sword-force to spare. Plum blossoms burst across the air and fell in a storm of cuts.
"!!?"
"—·—!"
"—·—·—ngh—?!"
They howled in pain, but if they had cut out their own tongues, they could not shape the pain into language.
"You lot are a special breed too. Why cut off a perfectly good tongue?"
Lee Han chided them lightly. They had no mind left to answer. The plum-blossom petals drove through assassin flesh and punched straight through hearts and the rest of the organs—bullets, in the most literal sense, riding the wind. Penetration and cutting edge were the heart of the plum blossom's power.
Even so.
"Still, you're not complete trash, are you?"
Teeth ground. The Plum Blossom Sword was ferocious, but once eye and body adapted, countering it was not impossible. Proof enough that his own art still had rough edges to spare. Even so—
"The scrubs are cleaned up, so it was good enough."
"—··—!"
Of the fifty-odd, half had been ground away. Among the rest, some were badly hurt and some were spraying blood, but none of the wounds were fatal, and the assassins who still lived poured a fierce hostility and killing intent toward him.
Strangely, Lee Han felt no threat at all. He was not a man who dropped his guard just because an opponent was weak, and yet—why did it feel like this?
"Why the hell are assassins this slow?"
"!!"
Are they just that soft?
The instant he kicked off, he was at their backs.
The step-art unfolded of its own accord, as if it had become one with his body.
The work he had put in after the fight in the Tunnels was finally showing itself. And once he could bring out Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow as naturally as breathing, hunting assassins felt as simple as an owl hunting mice.
"—··—forty-four—·—one!"
One of them, perhaps, was giving orders. The moment he understood how wide the gap was between Lee Han and the rest of them, he barked something, and the assassins' momentum changed all at once. Three of them charged.
And then—
They detonated.
The assassins who had rushed him turned their own bodies into bombs. A charge that spent a life to erase the enemy: a single chilling move, and one that used the whole body as the charge, which made it nothing short of terrifying. Stir Fighting Art until the body explodes, and bone and flesh burst outward like a Claymore mine to wipe the target away. Stronger than any ordinary explosive. No matter how skilled the knight, a grave wound would be unavoidable.
That was what people called common sense.
However.
"Ugh. This feels foul..."
He brushed the dust from himself.
"......"
"Why do assassin bastards all fight this filthy? Tsk."
Common sense worked on half-baked men. It did not work on him. There was not so much as an ordinary scratch on Lee Han's body. His clothes were a little dirtier, a little more torn, and that was all. And the body showing through those torn clothes was, quite simply—
"......How can a man even have a body like that?"
The only assassin whose tongue was still whole asked a question for the first time. The physique was appalling. Steel. A body so far past wonder that one had to doubt it was human skin at all. If an ogre or a troll actually trained its muscle, could it come out looking like that?
He didn't know. He had never seen that. For a moment he could only wonder whether the man had taken the same illegal procedures they had.
"...A procedure that natural shouldn't even be possible."
Procedures worked by secret arts had a fatal weakness, and it was nothing other than this: the result drifted away from human shape. By rights the skin ought to have changed into something like a monster's hide. On that body, he could not find so much as a trace of it. And Lee Han, on the receiving end of the assessment, snorted.
"You think I'm one of you?"
Illegal procedures. What a joke.
"I put in more than twelve hours a day on body training alone to build this."
A grueling effort, made so he could use Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow and Diamond Body the way other men used a passive. Faced with a slight that knew nothing of that work and tried to write it off as back-alley surgery, Lee Han's face twisted.
"Then can that procedure of yours do this?"
His fist cut the empty air. A motion with no readable purpose. They had just begun to wonder why he was doing it when they had to wrench their eyes wide all over again.
A fist struck nothing. The force banked, unseen, and came down like a cannonball.
One assassin's head collapsed like a crushed tomato, and he died where he stood.
Lee Han threw punches without picking targets, and the assassins could not block a single one. Invisible fists rushed in like cannon shot. How was anyone meant to stop that?
"Block it."
Kind of him, really. He announced that a punch was coming, and struck the empty air again. And so the number of assassins turned into tomatoes grew, which was more than enough to teach panic to men who had endured a training both cruel and thorough.
"I even told you. Why can't you block it?"
Lee Han was being considerate. Regrettably, not a single assassin remained in any state to receive the courtesy.
They dropped.
The assassins had, to a man, become Dullahans. Which is to say, every one of them had parted ways with his head.
"...Vicious bastards."
It looked as if he had handled them easily, but Lee Han knew better. He had won so cleanly because his methods had thrown them. The Plum Blossom Sword to open, then Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow and Diamond Body, and Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox to finish. Ways of fighting this world had never seen. They had gone down with no time to adapt. Don't call it cowardly. A fight has never had any use for cowardice, or for the lack of it.
That did not make the assassins easy. The self-detonation in particular had been unsettling, and an exceedingly cruel trick. If it had been someone other than him...
"Hm. Maybe not even that."
Lee Han had the feeling the mess would have been settled even if he had not gone out of his way to step in. And well he might.
"Magnificent, as expected, Sir Turtle. It makes my coming to support you feel rather pointless."
There had been others standing guard besides him.
"...Not Tristan. Galahad, or Lionel?"
"Galahad."
"Yeah?"
Even setting aside the ones Lee Han had stopped, there had been a great many assassins. That sun-broiled lunatic must have had money rotting in his pockets, hiring the bastards by the wagonload. Lee Han had only blocked the ones coming from the east and paid the rest no mind, because he already knew there were others working to keep the children alive. Judging by the presence to the west, those were Tristan. A presence he knew. Which meant the strangers plugging the other two directions—
"Ah. Looking at you like this, you seem familiar. You're one of the black masks who showed up when that old chick moved in next door, aren't you?"
"...You still remember that?"
"My memory's garbage, but I'm weirdly good at remembering things with my body. Faces, no. Presence, yes. Something like that?"
"Remarkable..."
The Galahad Shadows. It had been a while, since the day half a year ago when Irene Windler became his neighbor.
"Fought for nothing. If you were here, I didn't need to step out."
Tristan and Galahad. Escort knights, surely, each sent to protect Little Bear and the mage chick. They did their work well.
And what are the White Cats doing?
The other houses moved to stop a disaster before it happened, and Pendragon... Aigo. Embarrassing. What was Big Sis doing? The princess he knew was not an incompetent woman, so she ought to have seen a mess of this size coming. It was a little shameful. Like it or not, the place was his workplace.
"Haha. It wasn't a pointless fight. The men Sir Turtle faced were the strongest of the assassins. If you had not stopped them, the damage would have been considerable. The defense might even have been breached."
"You don't have to butter me up..."
"I'm being honest. Just what one would expect of the man who lectured His Grace."
"...Were you there too?"
"Personally, I thought it was magnificent."
"......So you were one of the gentlemen who saw my dark history."
Lee Han smiled sourly at that—at the fact that this man had been in the crowd when he brazenly gave a duke a piece of his mind. The Galahad knight, for his part, looked thoroughly amused.
"Haha. Sir Turtle may be the only man who would call that a dark history. In Galahad, we call you the Loyal Hero. The Loyal Hero."
"Loyal Hero...?"
"Short for 'the brave man who did not withhold remonstrance.' Scolding His Grace is an achievement no one could have managed, save the late Martial God. Ahaha!"
"Hmm..."
It was not a nickname he could feel entirely easy about.
Is that an insult, or a compliment?
Lee Han scratched his cheek. Still, from the way the man had come up to him with goodwill, he could tell that Galahad's retainers did not find him unpleasant. Well.
"...That one looks like he hates my guts, though."
A man could not be liked by everyone.
A spear punched through the ten or so assassins still standing, all of them in a single stroke. It was a perfectly ordinary spear, the basic shape the word itself was made to mean. And yet the moment that plain, unlovely thing was thrust, it looked like a ballista built to pierce whatever stood in front of it. Spear-work that dragged admiration out of a man whether he wanted to give it or not. If there was such a thing as the ideal thrust, it was that one, and he had to admit it even while resenting the admission. It was perfect to that degree. And the face of the knight who had produced that admirable, perfect thrust was a face Lee Han knew.
"The thrust is art. The personality is a wreck."
"...Haha."
The Galahad knight could only laugh. For a moment, the situation was simply too funny. The Vice-Captain, who had watched the fight a moment earlier, had done the very same thing.
"Hmph. Sharp-edged personality, but those fists are first-rate."
Praise in one breath and an insult in the next. Watching it, the knight thought that people with real skill were—
...Cut from the same cloth, maybe?
Truly interesting human beings.