Two Men See It Through to the End (3)
Lee Han's Lie Detection was an ability even Isis acknowledged.
His hearing caught the sound of a heart. His touch read the smallest shift in another body. Smell and taste went beyond the scent of sweat; they could tease out the faint odor of a lie itself, the minute changes in a man's hormones. Sight registered the slightest slackening of muscle, the contraction of a pupil, even the quiet tremor running through a body. And last of all, his sixth sense helped him gather the whole of it into judgment and decision.
In that sense, Lee Han's lie detection was a technique that called every sense he had into service at once.
Easy enough to say. In ordinary life, brutally hard to use. Reading a man by mobilizing every sense piled up a considerable weight of stress and fatigue, and if he abused it his head would spin until the world tilted. Perhaps that was proof that a power this large demanded a price to match.
And so—
"First question. If you know whether the mages driven out of the Magic Tower are alive or dead, can you track where they are as well?"
Yellow gave his head a loose, wagging shake. No, apparently.
A prickle.
For an instant there was a faint smell of sweat, and something raw and fishy underneath it.
"Right. So you can."
"!?"
"Second question. Is that tracking still possible now?"
"......"
"Hm."
Yellow exercised his right to remain silent. The first lie had been a test, a way of confirming Lee Han's detection, and now—cunning, as expected of a spell-slinger—he meant to give nothing more. Lee Han could feel the resolve in him, a stubbornness that said he would not react again.
An awkward spot, no question. Lee Han, however, was unbothered.
"Oh? So you can."
"!!!"
It didn't matter whether the man stayed mute. A body's reactions were not something you could hide simply by refusing to react. Even without an answer, the minute shift in body odor, the beat of the heart, the faint tremor in the muscles, the dilation of the pupils, the sound of breath—all of it yielded plenty. Combining that information into certainty was the work of his sixth sense, and if that sixth sense needed another name, judgment would do.
Three years—no, depending how you looked at it, more than half his life—had been tangled up with spell-slingers and spent fighting them. They said you knew best the thing you hated, didn't they? In his past life, the antis who tore into celebrities became experts on the famous people they despised, just so they could tear them down properly. And Lee Han was the anti of antis, the man who loathed mages more than anything else in the world. It would have been fair to call him an appraiser, a specialist in the character of mages.
—I'm not wrong.
He believed it the way a man plants a suggestion in himself, trusting the information he had gathered and the judgment built on it. Not a flicker of doubt. Along with the certainty that he was the greatest mage-appraiser in this world.
And so.
"Is the Magic Tower still keeping in contact with the Illegal Mages?"
"Does the Magic Tower have some device for watching them, tracking them, or reaching them?"
"Did you come to the kingdom not only to meet Irene Windler, but to meet an Illegal Mage as well?"
"Do you have impure intentions toward Irene Windler?"
"Are you planning to carry out an attack on the kingdom?"
"Are the Empire and the Magic Tower preparing to strike Pendragon?"
A festival of question marks.
Cold sweat was already sliding down his skin, and his head had begun to throb, but Lee Han did not stop asking. It was an obsession close to madness—a determination to find the mage no matter what, no, to know everything.
"...Ugh, ughh...!"
Yellow—Huey de Byron—shook with fear. The dreadful obsession and madness bearing down on him, the killing intent aimed at mages, soaked him through with terror. He could see in it a resolve to destroy mages at the root, and before that pressure Huey de Byron finally broke.
"Khhh..."
He collapsed. His eyes rolled back, and he fainted outright.
"...Bastard. You want dramatics? I'm the one dying over here."
Foam at the mouth made the faint look a little overdone. Lee Han clutched his aching skull against the headache and frowned. He was the one whose head felt ready to split, so why was the man who only had to sit still for questioning suddenly rolling his eyes and passing out? Typical spell-slingers. Feeble in mind and body both.
He drank the rest of it then, iced coffee and milk tea alike. The thirst had climbed until it was maddening.
That was when everyone inside the café went quiet at once. A moment ago they had looked like ordinary housewives, laborers, a girl working a shift. Every one of them stopped smiling and stopped talking.
And then—
"......Even I would have fainted. No. I'd say ending it with a faint is impressive."
A man walked over. His face looked ground down by exhaustion, but his eyes were calm and brilliantly alight, and he carried the air of someone who was, in his way, a considerable figure. Lee Han offered the man who had helped him a plain thanks.
"Thanks."
"Not at all. I'm glad I could be of help, Sir Lee Han."
Simon, chairman of the Pendragon Guild Union. He was also the man who had hired every customer and every employee in this café today.
"I'll settle the bill later."
"Haha, it's really quite all right. Ah—and I'd ask you to move along before long. Guild soldiers are steering the other soldiers away from the café, but they can't hold them off forever."
"...Right."
With that, Lee Han shouldered the unconscious mage and strolled out of the café, his pace unhurried, as if there were no need to rush at all. Simon watched him until he was gone.
"...Truly a frightening man."
He had watched from beginning to end as Lee Han drove the mage into a corner.
Relentless? No. Something past relentless. It had been like staring into a hot flame, and the mage had looked like a man flailing as the fire took him. If Simon himself had been put to an interrogation like that, he could swear he wouldn't have lasted a second before fainting or pissing himself. That was how frightening it had been. A ghost or an evil spirit would have seemed cute by comparison.
"Hoo. I really do need to stay on good terms with that man."
He had been an enemy once, and that was how he had learned the relentlessness; the more he learned, the more frightening the man became. If anyone asked Simon who the most frightening person in his life was, he would name that one without hesitation. He clicked his tongue.
Lee Han came out of the café chewing, pulled a lunch box from his bag, and ate. The midday meal Miss Maid had passed to him.
"...It's good."
Miss Maid, as expected. She couldn't manage housework, but her cooking was excellent, and the meal was satisfying beyond words.
He let out a long breath. Perhaps it was the care packed into the food. Body and mind, worn thin by the excessive reading of his senses, recovered a little, and Lee Han loosened his limbs. By the feel of it—
Half a day. Or three hours at the least, if I rest, and I'll be recovered.
He kept the recovery time in mind down to the minute and decided to look for a place where he could rest lightly.
Where should I go? Blackie's? Or Timid's hideout?
Having raised his disciples well had its uses. There were quite a few places he could rest for a while.
Or should I just show my face to both of them?
He had a body to hide, but he also had something to ask the two of them. Whether a thing like this had happened before the regression, or in the game's story.... He needed that question answered, and if this was something that was never supposed to happen, then it would only be reasonable to find out where the problem had begun.
Just as Lee Han was sorting through his choices—
He stopped.
"......"
A new option had appeared, and he had to halt where he stood. He had bundled his cargo in a wrapping cloth, but the thing he was carrying was conspicuous enough that he had taken a little-used road. And yet, directly across from him, a man was looking straight at him.
None other than—
"We see a lot of each other, don't we? Can't say I'm glad of it."
"Likewise."
Rak de Duron. Strange, for a man with a bad memory, that Lee Han had heard the name once and remembered it exactly—and the knight of Galahad who bore it was blocking his path, as if he had known Lee Han would come this way and had been waiting.
"...I don't have time to deal with you. I'm busy too."
Whether the man was there or not, Lee Han's stride didn't falter. He meant to walk straight past him as if Rak weren't there at all.
"Galahad's safehouse is near here."
"......"
"You appear to be in need of rest. In that case, our safehouse would be suitable. There is even a medicinal hot spring."
"Khrm..."
The fellow was pulling a stunt that didn't suit him, and Lee Han swallowed a groan. He was desperate for rest as it was, and the mention of a hot spring shook him badly. He didn't know whether the offer had been made with that in mind, but one of his hobbies was hot springs. And the man added to it, like a follow-up blow.
"There is also high-quality milk, and ice cream."
"Oh, please. How old do you think I am, to fall for something like that? Unbelievable..."
Lee Han found it simply ridiculous, this man trotting out the last of the benefits as if it were something to boast about. Of course he knew that in this world high-quality milk and ice cream cost an astronomical sum, and that the taste was as rich as the price and good for the health besides. Even so, he wasn't a child. Was he really going to be won over by an offer like that? This one wasn't exactly silver-tongued either, he thought—and then—
"Well? You going to lead the way?"
"......"
"What?"
He had most certainly not been bought by the hot spring, or by the high-quality ice cream. It was only that fleecing a rich man with money to spare sat easier on his conscience than holding out his hand to his young disciples and looking pathetic while he did it. So there was nothing to feel guilty about at all—
"Wipe your drool, scoundrel."
"......"
...Come on. Pretending you hadn't seen a thing like that was basic courtesy in the murim world.