The Knights' Spring (3)
How was anyone supposed to trust the word of a child from the streets?
If someone had asked him that, Lee Han would have said the boy's nerve was the proof, and the way he stood there as if he had every right to.
…Well. His heartbeat is quiet, too. Eight-tenths of that trust probably belonged to Lee Han's own talent for catching a lie.
And then, as if he feared they might doubt him anyway, the boy even offered up where the information had come from. His eyes were clear. His legs shook badly enough to show he was afraid, but he wore the look of someone who refused to let the chance of a lifetime slip away.
"Ah, I—the reason I know this is, I heard it from a merchant who was drunk. A long time ago. He used to trade with the Magic Tower."
Lee Han looked at the boy, Patrick, and asked, "Kid. You sure you're all right with terms like these, and not the money?"
"Yes! Just take me as far as the South. That's all I need!"
"…Doesn't sound like much of a choice."
What Patrick wanted was to run from the Empire—no, from the Central Continent. He had named that as the price of his information, and he nodded hard.
"The Center right now is a volcano that could blow any day. The cities the lords and the vassal kings rule are all at each other's throats, and the imperial house hasn't got the pretext or the strength to stop them. So the moment a few shots go off, the Empire goes straight to war. And a kid like me gets conscripted on the spot. If that's the choice, I'm better off going south."
"…You worked all that out on your own?"
"Turn it over a little and the numbers come out, don't they?"
"……What was I even doing at that age."
A hollow laugh escaped Lee Han. The kid was something else. The nerve and the poise were impressive enough, but the mind behind them was nowhere near ordinary. If the Empire hadn't already fallen into this state, wouldn't he have made a name for himself as a prodigy?
He was still turning the thought over when another voice cut in.
"And yet, why us? Do you truly mean to swear that we will see you safely all the way to the South?"
Lark's question came out of nowhere. On the surface it sounded like a threat, but Lee Han knew better.
He's testing the boy. The way a man appraises an uncut stone.
"…I've dealt with a lot of merchants, so I know," Patrick said. "They say if you want a business to succeed, sometimes you have to be bold. Not just charge in blind, though. You have to be sure it's going to work. That's why I think you knights are worth a bold investment."
"On the strength of what?"
"You're strong, yes. But you also didn't brush me off just because I'm a child. You treated me like an equal, and…"
"…and you came here to punish mages. That makes me trust you."
"Spell-slingers?"
"…Yes. I really hate mages. …Spell-slingers."
Both knights went silent. He was trying to hide it, but a grudge and a hatred that could not be hidden showed through all the same. However clever he was, a child was still a child, and Patrick could not quite bury what he felt.
The two of them did not press him. They only followed where he led, and as they watched his anger, something in their faces said they understood.
And so they came to it.
"We're here."
"That's the thing?"
"Yes. The only entrance that can reach the Magic Tower."
They stood at the heart of the city, before the vast installation that held up the Colony's veil—an observation network where a mage waited at all times to tend it. The boy who carried the grudge said the building was not used for that alone. There was a device here that traveled to the Magic Tower. In a word—
"The merchants look at that and call it a Portal."
"Hmm."
"Sir knight?"
At that odd little reaction, Patrick blinked. Was something wrong?
Lee Han gave a small shake of his head. Nothing was wrong, exactly. "That thing's less a portal than just…"
He couldn't quite bring himself to finish—it looks like a capsule launcher—and scratched at his cheek instead.
Did the Magic Tower have no enemies?
"Loads of them!"
The boy said it flat. Enough to trip over, he insisted. Even setting these two knights aside, people scheming against the Tower were everywhere you looked. For an organization of that rank, having no enemies would have been the stranger thing.
In that sense, the Magic Tower had been attacked more times than anyone could count. Not one of those attacks had succeeded.
The reason?
"They say a mana barrier protects the Tower. From what I've heard, it's insanely tough."
A mana barrier. The sort of basic field a mage unfolded with telekinesis—except the one spread around the Magic Tower was on another level entirely, in both quality and scale.
"A long time ago there was a full assault with siege engines. They hammered it for over a month, and it didn't so much as flinch."
Would you believe that the mages under attack sipped tea through the whole of it, utterly unbothered, and made conversation about what fine weather they were having? The Tower's mana barrier was that solid. Solid enough that no one could even dream of breaking it.
Which was why—
"No matter how strong you knights say you are, breaking into the Magic Tower won't be easy. Even in history, the knights and armies people called the very best never managed it. So the only way in is to use that portal."
No sooner had Patrick finished than a round object hissed out of the strange building's ejection port and climbed the sky. Smooth as glass, it knifed through the air toward the Magic Tower. It passed directly over the Colony where they stood, so they could take in the whole sight—right down to the moment the capsule slipped neatly inside.
"You saw that, right? Steal one of those, and you'll be able to get in somehow. Not that it'll be easy."
Patrick let out a long breath. He had given them every explanation he had. The moment he finished, fatigue crashed over him, and his head went cold.
Did I just do something stupid…?
Sober now, he felt it all over again. The Magic Tower might truly be an impregnable fortress. However strong those knights were, taking it might be impossible.
The portal's the same. Easy to say. Even if we seize the building, that doesn't mean we can use it. It might not move at all unless a mage is the one working it.
No. More accurately, it almost certainly would not move for anyone but a mage. The Magic Tower Patrick knew was not run by fools. He hated them without limit, and that was precisely why he had no choice but to rate them highly. You had to know an enemy before a way to face them appeared.
…And the more you looked into that enemy, the more the trouble became that no answer ever came.
Dad. Mom…
His teeth ground together. Even so, the reason Patrick still burned was his parents, dead without justice.
After they built the Colony, the Magic Tower had lifted a station that was already formidable in the Empire even higher. They grew more arrogant than nobles, more extravagant than merchants, more authoritarian than royalty. Knowing that without them there was no way to hold the blizzards back, they enjoyed that station to the full. At last the mages' tyranny crossed the line, and they began to torment the people who were not nobles—the ones called the lower class.
Patrick had never forgotten. The day their household, poor though it was, and warm all the same, was smashed to pieces. A mage spread a plague in the name of an experiment, and a whole village was laid to waste. The villagers were dying. His parents were dying. And still—
A gaze that did not seem to see people as people. Patrick still could not forget it.
The mage left. Patrick waited for death as well, but by fortune he lived, because he drank the only potion in the village. His parents had secretly fed him that single potion to save him. Afterward he was the village's only survivor, and he had never once let go of his grudge against mages.
Some people said it. Mages were a necessary evil. Evil, yes, but still of help to people.
Don't make me laugh.
He wanted to scream it. There was no such thing as a necessary evil. People only pretended not to see. Those damned mages committed more evil than anyone could count, and the world looked away from all of it.
So Patrick hated everything, and trusted money alone.
Wasn't there a god? God is nothing but a bystander. God never laid a hand on the world. God only watched. That was not a being you could trust, and not one that helped. Money, though, did not lie, and it did not betray. So he believed in it.
And once he had gathered enough of it, there was something he wanted to try.
Become a merchant. Become a merchant and make an absurd fortune… pile up enough wealth to erase the Empire. No—enough to erase even the Magic Tower.
In a sense, that was the goal of his life. He knew it was close to impossible. Even so.
Someday…!
It was a goal he meant to reach, no matter what.
But now, feeling it all over again, the Magic Tower was simply too vast, and too powerful. Too much so to even dream of pulling it down. Patrick hung his head. His dream felt unbearably childish.
"S-sirs, I think maybe…"
He hid what he felt, and the fury under it, and barely managed to go on. No matter how he looked at it, two people bringing down that impregnable fortress was nonsense. The colder his head became, the more their charge looked like suicide, and on a human level he meant to stop these decent knights before they got themselves killed. He hoped they would treat their lives as something worth keeping.
Except they had already started preparing the assault.
"You seeing anything?"
"Be still. If my focus scatters because of you, will you take responsibility?"
"…I'll be still."
"Hmm. I see. So that's the structure…"
"…Sirs?"
Patrick blinked and called to them, wondering what on earth they were doing. A hand tapped lightly against his head.
"You led us well, kid. Thanks to you, I think I can feel out how we're going to crack it."
"…Yes?"
"In the end it's the same old thing. You don't win by stupidly bulling through on strength."
"…What?"
"Just wait, kid. I'll show you in a little while."
Patrick could not understand them at all.
Even so. He doesn't look it, but his hand is kind. The rough palm stroking his hair was, somehow, warm, and the anxiety that had been shaking in his chest quietly settled.
What Lee Han had said to the boy was not empty courtesy. The child had genuinely helped, and he had thanked him because he meant it.
I can tell it's an impregnable fortress. The power spread around it is no joke. He could feel, by instinct, that the thing was hard because hundreds of spell-slingers were holding it with telekinesis. The only one who could punch through something like that barehanded would be an Aura User.
But Lee Han did not give up. So it was hard—what of it? When had any of this ever been easy?
Watching the portal the boy had shown them, the capsule carrying people up to the Magic Tower, he understood. Ah. There was a gap in that, too.
Obvious, really. However strong a barrier is, it can't be perfect. Nothing in the world was complete. Everything had a seam, and the law of an assault was to stab that seam until it tore into a hole.
In that sense—
"I see it."
His luck was good. The guide Galahad had attached to him had uncommon eyes. A gaze dyed in three colors fixed on the Magic Tower hanging in the sky, and when the capsule passed through, the guide remembered even the current that showed itself in that instant.
Lark de Duron—the only knight, in all of Galahad's long history, to succeed in embodying seven Mysteries as technique—had found the gap in the Magic Tower that no one had discovered in a thousand years.
Finding a gap and breaking it were different matters. To break that one, they needed a destructive weapon that could pierce the sky at the same speed, and on the same path, as the capsule.
And as it happened—
"Scoundrel. Among those techniques of yours, do you happen to have one that can surge into the sky like that capsule, and still hit hard enough to smash a rampart?"
"…Do people usually ask whether a person can do something like that?"
"I ask because you are not a person."
"So. Do you have it, or not?"
"Hhh. It's not that I don't…"
"Hey—! You're the one who asked. Why are you looking at me like that?"
"…You beast."
"—?!"
As luck would have it, they had their weapon.
KRAAAAAANG—!!
The Magic Tower—no, the tower in which a "monster" wearing the shape of a person made its home—split in two and fell from the sky. Fortunately, there were no "casualties."
— Excerpted from the diary of Patrick, the Golden Caravan Lord —