Two Men, to the Very End (4)
When the blond mage Huy opened his eyes, what met him was a baleful glare that dropped his heart like a stone.
"...Hhk!"
He had already been half-strangled by some nameless knight, crushed under pain and pressure fierce enough to choke the breath out of him. To come back to himself and find that murderous stare waiting was enough to send his mind reeling white all over again.
But rotten or not, he was a grand disciple of the Magic Tower.
A station like that left a man no choice but to judge a situation quickly and turn his thoughts quicker still. He confirmed that the lonely quiet held no one but the man with the baleful eyes, and he forced his own eyes wide.
Gone—they're gone! Th-that monster is gone!
The freak who had snatched him from the VIP chamber between one blink and the next. The same freak who had handled him with brutal thoroughness, wrung every vital secret of the Magic Tower out of him by some unknowable means, and at the last had poured out an aura so hideous it still seemed to cling to the air.
A twitch.
More than that—his body moved. Only a little. But it moved.
A ch-chance!
Rope still bound him, and a man sat directly in front of him as if keeping watch. But if that nightmare of a freak was truly gone—
"P-please... s-spare... me..."
Couldn't he try to escape?
Seventeen hours without a drop of water had left his mouth and throat rasping like a rusted harmonica. The sound would not come out right. What mattered was that the voice locked in his throat was working again, and he hurled a plea at the baleful-eyed man as if he were clawing for it.
As a grand disciple of the Magic Tower he had never bowed his head to anyone. He could fairly have claimed that the whole history of his life contained not a single request. Now he was groveling. Anyone from the Tower who saw it would have doubted their own eyes, but Huy felt that if it would get him out of that dreadful monster's hands, he could beg even a devil of Hell. He had been driven that far.
"I-if you only help me, I can give you anything. On the name of the Magic Tower, I swear I'll keep the promise..."
"......"
"S-so please..."
By any ordinary measure, what was he trusting that baleful man for, making a plea like this? Huy was not in his right mind. Look at it another way, though: even out of his mind, he was still proposing a deal. In a sense, wasn't that rather impressive?
And then—
"An interesting offer."
"...!"
A favorable answer. Huy crowed in secret. Yes—this was the reaction he had wanted. He rushed on.
"Th-then please, water and something to eat, at once...! This ruined body has to recover..."
He had to restore a body that would not hold its balance. Strength, stamina, mental force—all of it was crawling along the floor, and even his mana was nowhere near normal. He could not properly cast so much as a basic spell. So food. No—even water alone would do. If only he had that!
"......"
"Wh-what are you doing! The water, quickly...!"
He was desperate, and the man showed not the slightest sign of moving. Before Huy knew it, he was snapping. Old habits die hard. It was the tone of a man who knew exactly how he treated anyone he considered beneath him.
And that was a mistake.
"......Right. So this is what it looks like, being taken lightly."
The arrogant mage never dreamed he had scraped the man's temper.
The spearhead punched through Huy's chest with a wet, bursting crack.
"Gyaaaaah...!"
"Ugh... ghk...!"
Huy thrashed in agony. Skin tore. Breastbone shattered. Blood poured out of him, splattering, soaking the floor, and Huy went down into it like a man who—
"—Wake up. It was only a small joke. You startle too easily."
"Hah—!"
He had felt himself dying. He was perfectly alive.
"...Huh? ......Huh...?"
Still reacting like a fool, he looked down at his own chest—the chest he was certain had been run through. The pain and the misery were still vivid. Huy shook as if his whole body were vibrating, terror and fear and hurt piling until he thought his mind would simply break. Already, for today alone, this was the second time he had met an unknown terror. Keeping hold of his sanity would be the harder task.
And so—
"...Ghhhhk...!"
Huy fainted again, eyes rolling back into his head.
He collapsed with a thud.
"...Ridiculous fellow."
The man frowned, watching him pass out once more. For all the words, nothing about him looked the least bit amused. And to that man—
"A man's trying to rest. Why's it so damn loud?"
"......"
"Hell of a way to treat a guest."
"...Hm."
The man—Lark—only drew his brows together at that, closed his eyes, and offered no reply at all.
"Ignoring me, huh..."
Lee Han grumbled, though his face was as unruffled as if he had never expected an answer, and he knocked back the milk. The look of a man who had expected nothing from him in the first place.
"...Whoa. Shit."
Still, credit where it was due. The bastard didn't seem to have lied.
This milk—what even was this taste!
Good enough to drag words like that out of me? Then what the hell have I been drinking all my life...?
This life or the last, Lee Han could swear without hesitation that it was the finest thing he had ever tasted, and before a flavor like that, everything was forgiven.
Porcelain clicked.
"Please, sir."
"Ah, thanks."
"Not at all. We were the ones who invited you. It's only proper."
"......He really shares blood with that plaster-statue bastard? How are the two of them this different?"
"Hehe. I hear that often."
The woman knight had brought milk shaved ice, ground fine as snow, and ice cream with it. Her face faintly resembled the spearman sitting over there with his sullen look, though her eyes were far gentler, and courtesy lived in her voice from the very first word. A beauty, and a face he knew: the Galahad knight who, during yesterday's monster attack, had looked after the unconscious Irene Windler.
He hadn't expected to see her again here, and he certainly hadn't expected to be eating the milk shaved ice and ice cream she set in front of him.
Well.
I'm eating it, though.
Lee Han ate what she gave him without a shred of suspicion. He had only just finished a hot-spring bath and been amazed by the milk, and this was made from that same milk, so of course—
"...Damn it. This is incredible too."
Harsh words again, offered up as praise.
"It comes only from cows that have received the Fairy's Blessing, so it's precious. It strengthens the bones, and the satisfaction it leaves is enough that you needn't eat for three days."
"...Milk that precious, and I don't think I've heard so much as a rumor of it."
"You wouldn't have. They're difficult to raise, and the breed exists only in Galahad. In a way, you could call it a specialty of Galahad alone."
"Hm. So if I want to taste this again, I've got no choice but to become one of Galahad's people. Dangerously attractive, this. No wonder I thought Galahad had too much talent..."
"Th-there couldn't really be anyone tempted by milk, could there?"
"Might be."
The spoon clicked against the dish as Lee Han set it down. Not even a minute had passed, and he had scraped the plate clean. It looked like gluttony, but he had savored every bite, and the satisfaction was complete.
"Would you like more?"
"No. Tempting offer, but even good things ought to be eaten in measure. Keep eating just because it's delicious and you get sick of it fast."
"Hehe. Then I'll bring you a cup of warm black tea."
With that she went out, and Lee Han found himself thinking she was a remarkably decent girl.
"So kind and hardworking I can hardly believe she's your little sister."
"..."
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"...I have no memory of ever being treated kindly by that vicious thing. Tch."
??
The spearman looked thoroughly displeased with the knight's conduct, and Lee Han could only shrug, wondering what the man had against a girl that well-behaved. Grumbling, when he had a little sister like that. Honestly.
Spoiled rotten, this brat.
A crooked one, no question. Then again—
A man carrying killing intent like that... maybe he's got no choice but to come out crooked.
His gaze slid, casually, to the blond collapsed on the floor with foam at his mouth. A face rigid with terror. A face so wracked and pained it might have belonged to someone who had just brushed death. Whether some spell-slinger had a near-death experience or lost all four limbs, Lee Han didn't much care. What interested him was the technique the spearman had shown.
He threw killing intent at the man and made him feel the pain and the misery? And close to the real thing, at that...
He guessed the spearman had used that killing intent to show something like a hallucination of one's own death.
Is that even possible?
However strong the killing intent, it was hard to believe anyone used the stuff as a method of attack. This wasn't even the realm of Heart Is Killing that showed up so often in martial tales.
Hm. Born with it, maybe?
A murderous will and a presence this overwhelming were not things a man picked up just by drifting from battlefield to battlefield. More likely something innate. A power in the same family as a Mystery.
Which was to say—
This bastard isn't a Heaven-Slaying Star, is he?
One of the Thirty-Six Heavenly Spirits, born beneath the ill-omened baleful star men called the Heavenly Gang Star. Lee Han nursed the suspicion for a moment.
...Am I still tired?
Then he snorted it off as nonsense. Martial arts, in a romance fantasy? Please. However you sliced it, something that absurd could not exist. Lee Han shook his head, telling himself he was only spinning idle thoughts because he was too tired.
Where in the world would you find a thing like that.
He dismissed it as a fool's notion.
"Finished playing by yourself?"
"Yeah. Done."
"......"
"What?"
"...I should stop expecting a normal conversation out of you."
"Don't pick a fight. So, did you get a good read of my notebook?"
"......"
"Think I wouldn't notice just because you read it on the sly?"
"Hm..."
The spearman looked mildly cornered. Lee Han stayed easy. He had known it would come to this. Why else would the man have brought him to a Galahad safehouse? To get friendly? Not a chance.
So. He wanted the information I'd gotten. Well—unfortunately for him.
"...There was a great deal I could not make sense of."
"Shameless bastard."
"......I'll have milk delivered to your house every week."
"...Why is that tempting?"
Even if the man had seen the notebook, understanding it would have been difficult. For good reason: much of it had been scrawled so that no one else could read it. He hadn't written in the letters of his previous life. Use those, and there was a real risk of being mistaken for some prodigy of language. All he had done was mix a simple cipher he had learned in the army with Morse code.
For the record, this world had Morse code too. Even so, the reason the man still couldn't make sense of it—
"The salmon climbing back against the flowing river... What is that supposed to mean?"
"A song. It's a song."
"A song?"
"There's one like that."
"...And what is Live I shall, ah, live I shall?"
"A poem. Poetry."
"......You amuse yourself in ways that don't suit your face."
"What's wrong with my face?"
"......"
"Hey! Answer me!"
Look as he might now, in his previous life he had been a boy of letters with feeling to spare—sensitive enough that, had his family only been well-off, he would have become a man of letters rather than a soldier.