EP.41 — Until the Heart Beats (1)
What announced the start of the battle was Lee Han's Lion's Roar.
━━━━━━━━!
HWOOOOOONG—!
Maximum volume. A cry of will that hurls even the blizzard into the sky.
For a single instant the resonance of pure fighting spirit sent even the blizzard shooting skyward — fiercer, and more thunderous, than any Lion's Roar Lee Han had ever loosed. The other mages were not merely deafened. The impact landed like a hammer to the skull, and one after another they dropped unconscious. Such was the might of a Lion's Roar at full volume.
And yet.
"Why are you turning down my offer? I just don't get it...?"
Struck dead-on by the roar, Tur could not have been calmer. He gave his hand a light, careless sweep.
"I'd dissect you without any pain, you know. Why are you going out of your way to suffer?"
Every time that hand swept through the air, the earth gouged open and the wind split, crashing down over Lee Han and Lark. An enormous mass bore down on them. Dodging never even entered the mind. From every direction at once the pressure rushed in, grinding them under with a madman's weight.
"It's Perspective Manipulation. I handle the three-dimensional space inside my field of view. Rather fun, isn't it."
The weight groaned down again, vast and crushing.
Tur was being kind. Kind enough, even, to explain exactly what was hitting them.
Perspective. Put simply, it meant the whole of the space his sight could reach, and to manipulate that space was nothing less than making imagination real. Everyone, at least once, has reached for a distant mountain or a cloud they could never touch — tried to catch it in the hand, or give it a little flick — and everyone knows the thing is an impossible illusion.
This impossible act, however—
"There. I'll knock it sideways."
—Tur could perform.
For a man who held mana like an ocean, and who had spent more than four hundred years studying magic without number, magic was no longer the sort of thing set off by an incantation. So long as the will was there, Tur's imagination always became reality. That, itself, was his magic.
Had anyone been watching, they might have said a god had descended, and the miracle of it would not have sounded strange at all. And yet—
Snick.
"Huh?"
Tur was promptly forced to prove that he was no god.
A small scratch had opened on his palm.
"Monster or not, he'd still need a catalyst if he's going to affect a three-dimensional world. Odds are his hands, or his eyes, are doing the work."
"Then we just cut them. That's the end of it."
"If you think about it simply... yes. That would be it."
The two knights leveled their blades at the mass bearing down on them. Faced with an enormous weight they could not even see, a man might well go pale, abandon hope, and give up everything — but the word surrender did not exist in either knight's vocabulary. They drove a sword-thrust and swung a spear straight into the oncoming mass instead.
"...Now that's a truly fun specimen."
The scratch on his palm interested Tur less than their resistance. Everyone who faced this for the first time simply gave up. Warriors whose souls had been tempered were different, as expected. A counterattack, of all things.
Watching them, he spoke.
"Wonder if you'll hold this one, too."
Setting himself as if to clap, Tur brought both palms together. The knights stood inside the space his eyes held, and if they failed to get clear, a human being would be crushed flat as an ant. There was nowhere to run, of course. He had laid traps all around everything his sight contained. Flee, and that would simply be another ending of its own.
He stopped short.
"...Oh?"
Tur blinked. Small wonder that he did.
A grinding creak tore through the air.
"You blocked it?"
His palms never met. They could not meet. A resistance that was anything but ordinary was holding the clap apart.
"Ghhhhk—!"
Lee Han was enduring Tur's clap by raw strength alone.
Another creak. Sure enough, the power of doping was a glorious thing. The force on him now — to put it so anyone could grasp it — was the pressure of a massive hydraulic press, and he was bearing that pressure with his body. Enduring, however, was not enough for Lee Han.
Just like that, he poured in his grip at full strength.
"...Whoa."
Tur's palms were no longer merely scratched. Wounds began to open as if the flesh itself were being gouged out, and Tur, delighted by the novelty, clenched a fist as though starting the experiment over and hammered it straight down.
In truth it was no different from a boulder dropped from directly overhead. And yet, once again—
"Blocking this too?"
Lee Han crossed both arms and stopped the blow. The ground heaved, a crater yawning open beneath him, and something in his knee and ankle ruptured with a sick crack — but he blocked it. He blocked it to the very end.
Tur felt a genuine wonder. Under any ordinary circumstance he ought never to have been wounded at all, and yet in four hundred years of life he had never once seen a warrior contest him in raw strength against Perspective Manipulation. How novel. That was all he felt, and his excitement rose.
"Well then. Let's see if you block this, too."
Tur swung fist and hand without rhyme or reason. Sometimes he swept a fist or an open palm; sometimes he blew, driving out a hard wind. At other times he clenched as if crushing something in his grip, and blew again, harder still. Each time, the earth shook until the ground itself seemed ready to collapse.
"Aaaagh!"
"R-run...!"
"T-Tower Lord?!!"
A natural disaster, born of motions that looked like nothing but play. The mages of the Magic Tower were caught in the shock — some could not even stay on their feet, others vomited blood from the aftermath. It was chaos, through and through.
But their screams never reached Tur's ears. What mattered now was seeing how well that specimen — no, his new toy — could hold.
And sure enough, Lee Han blocked all of it. Thud. Crack. Whenever a fist came flying or a palm moved to strike him, he drew his sword at the right instant and cut, or else he kicked the blow aside. Whether thanks to the doping or not, even the damage to his knee and ankle recovered quickly, and little by little the speed of his answers outpaced the speed at which Tur's attacks were hurting him.
"—!"
A single mistake would become a catastrophe, so Lee Han had no time even to draw a proper breath. He threw his body about like a man gone mad — strike, knock aside, block. The sight of him carrying out those three things without a single error was harrowing.
"AAAAAH!!"
The only outlet he allowed himself was a shout, forced out like a fighting cry, and even that looked like a man testing the very edge of his limit.
Struggle. A struggle with his life staked on it.
Every movement carried its desperation and its ferocity, plain to feel, and Lee Han advanced — only a little at a time, but forward. To live, he knew by instinct that he had to kill Tur, and his flesh answered that will, taking one step after another. An infinitely small step. A great one.
The distance between Tur and Lee Han was some two hundred paces. Blood poured with every step he took, and his bones cracked again and again, yet Lee Han pressed forward all the same.
A knight who did not know retreat. A man who seemed never to have learned how to step backward — he was, in a word, a Turtle. The surname had been thrown together at random, back when he first became a knight and was granted a name, but looking at Lee Han now, it was plain that no surname could have suited him better.
"Puhahaha! What is that!"
Someone else might have been stirred by the desperation of it and burst out in admiration. Tur laughed. It was the laugh of a man sneering — Do you honestly believe you can reach me?
Then, all at once, like a cruel child at play, he shifted to a different motion of the hand.
His palm flicked through the air, and for an instant it moved as if scooping sand.
A long, rolling thunder answered.
......The earth turned over.
An absurd scene unfolded, heaven and earth flipped on their heads, and when Tur's hand at last turned over with idle ease, Lee Han's body dropped into the deep, deep ground and went tumbling.
"...You monster bastard."
He stared, sick to death of it, at the mass of soil and snow bearing down on him. It came roaring in like a torrent.
A scoop of the hand. The world turns over.
A horrific power — impossible to believe as the work of a single mage. More horrific still was that the ground, in flipping, had buried Lee Han along with it.
Buried under that mass of soil and snow he certainly was, and Tur, as if confirming a kill, pounded the earth without a moment's hesitation, palm and fist, one after another. Boom. Crash. Still not broken? Even like this—? He looked exactly like a child worrying at a toy to satisfy his curiosity.
How long ago had it been that he rejoiced at finding a rare specimen? Already he was wrecking it to this degree. It was nothing short of terror — a moment that made perfectly clear why he was called the greatest madman of the Magic Tower.
Which was why blood burst, and then ran.
"Ah. Right. You were here."
So busy playing with a single toy, Tur had forgotten there was another, and even with blood streaming down his cheek he showed no particular feeling. Bleed though he might—
A soft brush of the fingers.
"All healed, see?"
"......"
"Tch. Boring. You don't even react."
"......"
"Hmm. But aren't you worried? Your friend might be dead. People usually die when they're buried under something like that."
"...Not a friend."
"No? I thought the two of you were close."
A sharp rush of air.
"Talk to me a little, won't you..."
Whether Tur's opinion was any of his concern or not, Lark's spear thrusts came without a pause. If the tank had soaked the blows with every ounce of his body, then the damage dealer's role was to run the monster through the throat.