The Knights' Spring (5)
Rrrrrumble—!
"……."
Crash—!
"...Noisy, out there."
Boom!
"Hm. Running longer than I expected? How unusual."
He had never cared what happened outside. He only ever read and researched in a space cut off from the world. Today, though, the noise refused to be ignored. Irritating sounds kept worrying at him.
KRAAAAANG!
It showed no sign of fading. It only grew.
Noise pollution on that scale was one step short of a killing.
"Tsk."
In the end he stood. He had not meant to go outside.
"Has something come that my own kin would find too much to handle?"
Something a little dangerous seemed to have arrived. He put a foot forward, if only to put a stop to the noise.
KRA-KOOM!
The greatest institution in the Empire. An impregnable fortress no one had ever breached. The mages' ivory tower. A Castle in the Sky no ordinary mortal would dare ascend. The mages' holy ground, called by countless names, was being ground apart.
By a calamity falling out of the sky.
It was the first such thing in a thousand years of history. Any ordinary institution, struck like this, would have lost its wits and simply come down. But this was the Magic Tower. Mages overflowed it, and then overflowed it again. Faced with the one who had dared attack their sanctuary, they shook not with fear but with rage, and they unleashed their magic.
Some worked to restore the castle as it broke. Some spread defensive spells. Some tried to mend the Tower's barrier. And the rest—
"That one! That one dared attack the Magic Tower!"
"You bastard...!!"
The mages sprayed magic at once. People liked to imagine that mages fought with lofty elegance, but there was nothing elegant in the scene before them. It was barbaric to the extreme. Well, it would have been stranger not to be furious when one's own house was being torn down—and yet, for mages who were supposed to keep their calm at all times, the display was low.
And so—
What are these things?
The intruder, the man who had done more than anyone to bring the Tower down, frowned. He was toying with the mages one-sidedly, and still something about it sat wrong in his gut.
Lee Han knew the creature called a mage far better than he liked. Hate had taught him better than anyone. Hunt them hard enough in this age and you became a specialist whether you wanted to or not.
...Which was why it was strange.
Why are they this sloppy?
Every kind of incantation rang out. Incantations meant to threaten him.
"O wind of the north, blow!"
"Harder—fiercer still!"
"O earth, aid me. Grow firm. Grow firmer still."
⟨ Tower Chant ⟩
"A blow upon whoever bars my path! Burn—burn hotter still!"
"O leaves, whisper to me. O earth, bring down your mace."
⟨ Fire, Leaf, and Earth ⟩
A bow of flame, hidden blades woven of leaves, a hammer made of earth—all of it came for him. Even so—
WHAM!
They're too easy.
The fist-wind bursting off Lee Han's punch wiped the magic crashing over him clean away. It did not stop at the spells. The mages, frail to a pitiful degree, had no answer for a blow they had not expected, and were simply blasted off their feet.
Overwhelming. Lee Han was overwhelming them.
"……."
And yet he did not look pleased.
It's not that they're weak.
They were not weak. If anything their level was high, and the magic was sharp. The students learning magic at the academy were not even worth the comparison.
...But that was all.
These bastards are bookworms.
And then he was certain. He understood why the people in front of him were this weak. No real combat. The refuge called the Magic Tower, he realized, had become poison to the spell-slingers.
Live somewhere this safe and you never learn how to hunt. They can toy with the endlessly weak, but a battle itself is something they've rarely fought.
The longer he fought, the clearer it became. These spell-slingers were tigers in a zoo. Not because the wildness had been bred out of them—simply beasts that could not hunt. Creatures that knew only how to eat the food set down in front of them.
Ridiculous. That was why something as crude as a surprise attack worked on them. So weak it was almost disappointing!
And so—
No way this is where it ends.
Lee Han raised his guard higher still. Once more: he knew spell-slingers better than he had ever wanted to. Calling him an expert would not have been an exaggeration, and though he loathed them he did not underestimate them, or look down on them. If anything, he treated the spell-casting breed as dangerous. More than anyone.
So it nagged at him. The spell-slingers he considered dangerous amounted only to this?
...Impossible.
Lee Han had never taken them lightly. These were parasites that had fed on the Empire for a thousand years. There was no way it ended here. He trusted them to exactly the degree he hated them.
And sure enough—
As if to repay that trust, they finally began to show what they really were.
"Yeah. Now something decent shows up."
The breed called spell-slingers, or mages, bore the epithet the Ones Who Prepare. It had several meanings, but in Lee Han's reading it meant they were sinister things that always prepared for a crisis. And those sinister things, at last—
"Th-the Bronze Giants are moving!"
"That intruder is finished."
"Heh. To think I would live to see the day that thing moved."
"...Tsk. Too late. Far too late."
Thud!
Thud-thud!
Boom...!
From inside the Magic Tower, split in half, it appeared, taking one vast stride after another. A thing of bronze, ten meters tall, large enough that giant was no exaggeration. And not one of them.
"...Twelve."
Ha.
So they really were hiding something fun.
Lee Han watched the twelve giants coming for him with keen, bright interest. A den of spell-slingers, after all—
This is more like it.
He clenched his fist, brutish and tight.
The mages of the Magic Tower had been thrown off when a Mana Barrier that had never once been breached came apart, and their first response had lagged by a beat. Even so, the crisis they felt was slight. And no wonder. The Tower was littered with means to remove an intruder of this sort.
The Bronze Giants alone were the fruit of arcane engineering—no exaggeration to say every wisdom of the Magic Tower had been gathered into them. A single frame could toy with a domain and destroy it, and there were twelve such frames. The intruder's death was as good as decided—
CRUNCH!
"...??"
The mages doubted their own eyes.
"Th-the giant's arm...?"
"...It came off?"
The Bronze Giant's arm had been torn free with absurd ease. Not by magic. Simply—
Crack!
The intruder, the knight, had ripped the Bronze Giant's arm off by strength. By overwhelming strength.
Had the knight read that thought, he would have laughed. He had not torn it off with strength. He had used technique.
Body weight and released force, piled into a single blow.
RUMBLE!
The ground shuddered as the giants came down on the knight. He never flinched. He simply stepped in.
Whoosh!
Slipping through their gaps as if to make sport of them, the knight moved like the wind. That a body so large could be so supple, and so fast, hardly seemed possible. The Bronze Giants were quick themselves despite their bulk, and he avoided them so easily that the mages could only stare, struck dumb.
And more—
Thud!
Even as he moved in a way that could only be called extraordinary, the knight drove a fist into a Bronze Giant, as if to prove that a body that large offered no shortage of places to hit. And the giant that took the punch—
Creak—crack!
...unbelievably, broke from the inside. Parts shattered, and the leg came apart.
CRUNCH!
He looked like a knight making sport of the Bronze Giants, enough to make one wonder whether the things had always been this frail. But the moment a Bronze Giant's fist met the ground and the earth heaved, it was obvious they were not weak at all.
Yes. The Bronze Giants were strong. They were slaughterers of battlefields, gods of destruction itself. How could they be weak? Which meant, put the other way—
"—What in the world is that thing?"
—that the knight had the skill to toy with Bronze Giants.
The mages could not hide their shock, but they soon came to their senses and readied their magic. They were not going to stand there gawking. They would step in and take that thing—
Shhk!
"!?!"
"L-Lord Devrik!!"
"Our kin!!"
The head of a mage about to cast simply flew. While every eye was fixed on the fight between the Bronze Giants and the knight, one Dire Wolf had already reached the battlefield. And the Dire Wolf never missed prey that had let its guard down. He cut the life out of it at once. As now.
"Foolish wretches. If you meant to step forward, you should have done so long ago. Who are you to shove into a knight's battle? Know shame—you who don't even know honor."
Rak.
The spear knight who had arrived on the field barked at the honorless mages and lifted his spear. He had thought the scoundrel would take them all, but fortunately there still seemed to be plenty left worth fighting.
Hm. Though the choicest prey has already been claimed by the scoundrel?
The Bronze Giants.
Grind—creak!
The giants fighting the scoundrel seemed to possess a self-repair function. Shattered arms and legs were growing back. And—
Clack! Clack-clack.
Judging for themselves that a human shape would have trouble beating the scoundrel, they were changing into beasts. Lion and bear, tiger and wolf, wildcat and monkey.
The world is wide, I'll give it that.
The Magic Tower indeed. So many peculiar things. And so it was a shame. He would have liked to face those himself.
Seems I've been left with nothing but disappointing scraps.
Just as Rak was about to frown—
CRACKLE!!
A fierce blow aimed at Rak snapped his mind sharp awake.
Flash!
He did smack the lightning aside quickly enough, but a numbness lingered in his arm. He had not shed the whole of the impact.
"The Elder!"
"The masters are here...!"
"It's over."
Whoooosh.
Five old men appeared, flying through the sky, and the mages' faces lit with joy, as if they had never been afraid. If the Bronze Giants were the Tower's guardian deities and weapons of destruction for annihilating foes, these were high mages whose power could not even be compared with the rest.
First-rank mages of the Magic Tower. By another name, Archmages.
Of the mere seven Archmages in the whole Empire, five now showed themselves here.
"He deflected that?"
"An uncommon warrior."
"A lowly creature all the same."
"True enough."
"Ho. He'd make a fine test subject—"
CRACK—!
Every time the Archmages opened their mouths, the words themselves became spells. Each utterance crushed the air with a violent pressure and shattered buildings to pieces. They were like living lumps of mana. There could be no monster like these monsters. In ancient times it was not rare for the Archmage breed to reign as gods, and looking at them now, it was not hard to see why they had been worshipped.
...And the man with five such Archmages before his eyes—beings once worshipped as gods—
"......Yes. Only now is this a little less disappointing."
—was feeling nothing short of satisfaction.
Yes. This was how it ought to be.
"Worth all that trouble, coming to the Empire to kill."
Fwoooosh!
A killing intent too vast to be called anything but thick poured from Rak's body. So thick it spread like fog!
The Dire Wolf, born carrying the killing intent of thousands, needed times when he could vent that intent to his heart's content. Usually his lord, Duke Blake, helped him often enough, but fortunately that would not be necessary today.
And no wonder.
I can kill as much as I please.
The justification was ample. Impious wretches who had dared aim at his lord—at the Galahad Magic Sword...!
There was only one punishment to hand down.
Death!
The Dire Wolf charged the mages.
"...Having the time of his life, that bastard."
Lee Han was dumbfounded. When was it that one had called him a madman, and now that he'd shown up he was the more excited of the two? This wasn't even an uncle who swore he hated amusement parks, only to have more fun than the nephews. Honestly.
"Hss. And those are the ones I wanted..."
But he felt some regret as well. The ones pouring out that vast mana, the archmage sorts, were the ones he had comparatively wanted for himself.
Fwoooosh!
...He had not come all the way to the Empire to grapple with weird robots. No—golems.
They were Bronze Giants breathing flame that called Greek fire to mind, and Lee Han drew his sword without a hitch and cut across.
A plain stroke would only have set them regenerating again anyway. So—!
Vmmm!
Lee Han charged his sword with a star cluster.
Shhk!
"...You feel grief too?"
Lee Han's single stroke split the Bronze Giant's body in half—no. It erased it. The fierce cohesion of force pouring from his sword wiped even a self-repairing Bronze Giant out so completely that it could not be restored.
But this—
"...So that was the power."
—was not particularly what Lee Han had intended. It was simply his first time using it in real combat, and he had not known the force would be this much.
Also called Sword River. Sword ki condensed past cutting—until what it touches is not severed, but erased.
Watching that higher form of sword ki, Lee Han took one lesson from it.
Don't use it on people. Not on people...
Not if he didn't want to become a murderer for no good reason.