As Long as This Heart Beats (6)
The snow had stopped.
The blizzard that had seemed as if it would fall forever.
But what was more astonishing still—
Drip. Drip.
The earth was thawing, and sprouts were pushing up through it. Snow that had surely stood more than five meters deep was melting in an instant. Life's vigor sank swiftly into the soil, and as the sprouts grew, the frozen ground—more wretched than any wasteland—was dyed green all at once. It was the color of life, and the signal flare that announced the beginning of spring.
The thickening sprouts spread wider each time the girl's lovely laughter rang out.
Squirm, squirm...!
With that writhing sound, flowering vines burst from the earth and blanketed the shattered Castle in the Sky, covering the remains of the dead mages and breaking them down. Where those mages had lain, trees arose in turn, from small saplings to great trunks, and before long the land for some thirty kilometers out from the castle had been remade entirely into a country of spring, brimming with spring's own breath.
A beautiful smell of spring. Earth thick with the vigor of life.
Shaa.
At some moment, sunlight peeked out over the yellow-green ground where spring had taken root. For now it only grazed the earth a little, but those rays would grow stronger yet.
Kyaha!
Waaaah!
Ahaha!
A being whose rank stood apart even among fairies. The Spring Fairy, who governed the seasons and, among them, wielded the authority of life, had descended upon the world. How could winter go on? Even winter had no choice but to withdraw in silence.
Rrrumble...
And what came apart beneath the sunlight the Spring Fairy offered was not only the Castle in the Sky and the mages' remains. Magic itself was being undone.
Magic. No one could deny that magic, too, was one corner of the Mystery that existed in this world, but it was nothing beside a fairy's authority. A human might raise a natural disaster with magic and still never overcome nature itself. Mana—no, a human—could not defeat the Will of Great Nature.
Softly—
The labyrinth an archmage had raised by pouring tens of thousands of spells into it, meaning to seal the knights away, collapsed as it stood and melted like snow. So long as the fairy wished it, so long as her anger toward the mages endured, perhaps mana itself would be erased from this land altogether.
"Since when was sunlight this welcome..."
He let out a breath. The knight who had been racking his brain for a way out of the labyrinth felt something close to joy as he basked in the warm glow and the light falling over him. It was only the sunlight he saw every day, and yet today it came to him as something terribly special, terribly dear. Not a cold knife of wind, but a warm breeze, warm air, and even the fresh scent of grass steeped in life. It was the scent of spring, in which life itself was pulsing.
While he drank in that breath of spring, he felt a gaze resting steadily on him, and he snorted.
"Finally. That infuriating smile is gone."
"......"
"How's it feel? Getting toyed with by the bugs you looked down on."
"......For a face like that, you turned out to be a warrior who can actually use his head."
On any other day Lee Han would have flared up with a What's wrong with my face! Even against the monster's jab, he stood entirely unbothered. Right now, he simply felt too good.
And so—
"It's not that I'm smart. You were just arrogant and stupid. A lunatic who lives under the delusion that he's an actual god."
"......"
He was only clubbing the man with the facts.
Tur looked, for a moment, as if the words had stopped his mouth.
"...Since when?"
Crack...!
Even as the vines that fed on his mana climbed his body, Tur seemed calm, and he put the question to Lee Han. A man with no sense would have cocked his head here and asked what the hell he was talking about. Lee Han's sense was sharp, and he understood at once what Tur meant to ask.
And so he answered.
"From the start."
"......"
"I planned it from the beginning, before I even came to the Empire. Honestly, I threw the thing together in an hour, so I wasn't sure it'd stick. I didn't think it'd go this well. In a way it was a gamble with bad odds. Call it fifty-fifty?"
"......"
He offered the answer kindly, the way one toys with someone.
"You know why those odds were even that good? That blond beast you raised. His mouth was loose as anything."
"...Is that so. Huy. That child..."
Tur understood everything.
"W-we kidnapped a fairy! T-ten years ago!"
The information Lee Han had dragged out of the blond spell-slinger—the one who called himself the Tower Lord's disciple—was endless. The Case of the Ten Thousand Missing. The Winter Fairy Incident. Hidden truths behind affairs that would shake the Empire if even one of them came to light.
That the Magic Tower was tied up in all of it was, honestly, something a man could have predicted. Spell-slingers committing the sort of crimes spell-slingers commit. That was all.
...But then a piece of information came out that shocked even Lee Han, and his mind went blank.
"K-kidnapped what?"
"A-a fairy. ...The Spring Fairy."
"......"
Even Lee Han felt the blow of it, there.
"You kidnapped the Spring Fairy? ...The likes of you?"
The blond spell-slinger's claim, that they had kidnapped the fairy who governed spring, was difficult to believe. Even among fairies her rank stood apart, and because she ruled a season, there were still places that worshipped the Spring Fairy as a god. That mere mages had taken her and kept her sealed for more than ten years was shocking, and past all credit. Archmages or not, how could such a thing be possible? Only after five hours of Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation, cross-checking him again and again...
"M-my master knew that fairies love children with clean hearts, and by taking the lives of ten thousand children as hostages, he s-succeeded in sealing her."
...did the words that followed leave Lee Han no choice but to believe.
"Bastards lower than beasts. I've seen the lot of you now...!"
"S-stop! Please, stop that insane torture...! Gyaaaaaah!"
"Even an onion would give up less than this!"
Peel them, and peel them again, and something worse kept coming out. Did these things commit a sin against the world just by drawing breath? The spell-slingers' crimes had no end—enough to make a man think so.
But however hideous the tale, Lee Han could build an operation on it.
Nothing else.
"We rescue the fairy."
"...Are you in your right mind?"
"I'm in my right mind, which is why I thought of it. Save the fairy, and it doesn't matter what those spell-slinger bastards pull. We win. Even if the Mystery she holds is only half of what's in the fairy tales and the history books, we couldn't lose if we wanted to."
"...That, I grant you. But with only the two of us, the plan is impossible."
When Lark first heard the outline, he opposed it. It had no grounding in reality. However strong they were, who could swear they might take the Magic Tower alone?
But—
"Then we just find help."
"?"
"Blackie, Taechang... no. Timid and the chicks ought to be about right."
"...You mad scoundrel."
"What? I'm saying it because I actually trust them."
Lark spat curses at the notion of asking the students for help, but Lee Han pressed the point without a shred of shame. Kids with something special in them. People with a move even he could not dismiss. If it was them, he could trust them with it.
And as if to answer that trust—
"See? That's what my kids can do."
"...For the young lady, it was only natural."
"You were the one fretting because you didn't believe, and now you talk..."
"You—!"
"Heh heh!"
The two knights bickered. Only a little while ago they had not even had the strength to trade words, and now they had room enough to squabble. The operation's success was a success, but more than anything, it was a delight that the disciples had done well. The dark-skinned one had been there too, so on paper failure had been impossible—but a calculation and a result were never quite the same thing, were they? In all honesty, Lee Han found his disciples' effort more praiseworthy than the success of his own plan.
And then, midway—
"Haha! Giving that child too much authority was the mistake. I kept him because the talent was decent, and look what side effect it produced. Kehehe!"
A monster's voice drifted in and soured their satisfaction all over again, and their brows drew tight.
...The bastard had started to laugh.
All around them, the Spring Fairy was turning every trace of mana into nourishment for the earth, and mages who carried mana within them were changing outright into something like plants.
Creak...
As if to prove that he could not escape it either, vines were binding him and he was turning into a willow, and still he was endlessly at his ease. Did he have some art that could answer a fairy's authority?
Impossible.
A fairy's Mystery was a great authority, one that made even an Aura User grimace and bow the head. Even if that bastard had been a mage who lived not four hundred years but a thousand, he could not defeat a fairy. To humans, a fairy was not something you beat. It was something you had to be acknowledged by. And a mage who had failed to win a fairy's acknowledgment—that existence—had no choice but to vanish from this day on. It was a future already settled.
And yet the bastard...
"Ah, don't worry. I'm not so much of a moron that I can't even tell this is defeat. I only came to think I'd been too arrogant, just as you said. And isn't the situation itself ridiculous? Toyed with, quite literally, by people I thought were nothing. Ah, I really was a lacking man. I shouldn't have played. I should have killed you at once."
"Bullshit."
"I know. It's far too late for regret. Hmm..."
Tur chuckled, wearing a look no one could read. The way his eyes rolled was deeply unsettling, and the two knights each took up sword and spear. They did not know what the monster meant to do.
"...Say. There's something I want to know. Was I that weak?"
"?"
"Don't overthink it. It's a simple question. Was I, as a being, weaker than an Aura User? Is that why I lost to you?"
"...You're asking that? Now?"
He could not be anything but a genuine lunatic. To chase his own curiosity even while he died... In a sense it went past horrible and into something revolting.
...Not that he had not been revolting to begin with.
"If you won't answer, I'll loose a spell toward the city. Even if the fairy is melting my mana, I can still annihilate a city or so."
"...What a hideous monster."
They knew the words were no lie. A hateful enemy, yes, but they acknowledged the strength he held. To be broken like this and still refuse to admit it would have been a problem of its own.
And so—
"...You are strong. Probably... no. To put it plain, until the day I die there won't be a spell-slinger more monstrous than you."
"Ooh!"
Lee Han had spoken, and Lark kept his mouth shut. An assessment of a mage would be more accurate coming from him anyway.
"Same goes for your question about Aura Users. Honestly, the difference between you and the old men isn't much. Look only at the variety of the magic and the sum of the power, and you might even be the more overwhelming one."
"Then..."
"But you are weak. Overwhelmingly so, next to those old men."
"...?"
It was a thing he could not understand. What did it mean, to be called strong and weak at once?
To such a man—
"It's your magic that's strong. The man called Tur isn't."
"......"
"It doesn't matter how powerful the magic is, or the sword art. What matters is the person using it."
There is no strongest sword art in the world, and no strongest martial art. Only the art of the strongest swordsman of an age gets called the strongest under heaven. Strength is relative, and being strong is not a thing one can define so simply. In that sense, the ones called Aura Users were strong people. They had survived fierce battles by the hundred and the thousand, and proved themselves.
...And the opposite.
"You're not one of them. In the end you're nothing but a spell-slinger who happened to live a little long."
A brat with nothing but power. A damn kid who did not know what a battle was, who treated struggle like a game and lived as if the world were easy. That was Lee Han's blunt verdict.
"...We didn't live carelessly enough to lose to the likes of you, sitting somewhere safe and treating the world like a playground. We lived hard. As long as this heart didn't stop, as long as it kept on beating, we fought, and we fought again."
And so he declared it outright.
"You were just weak as a person. That's all. So now..."
"......"
...Even at a last word that amounted to a curse, Tur only stared, blank.
It was not that Lee Han's explanation had struck him. Words like those, he had...
Master?
...heard before, and they had only thrown him a little.
Tur, remember. You have the talent to turn the world over. In all this world, the mages who could surpass you are perhaps a mere handful—or perhaps there are none at all. You have talent to that degree. But Tur, though you may become great as a mage, you will never become great upon the battlefield. Your character is not grave enough for it, and your very nature is alien. Do not fight knights, if you can help it. The knights of Pendragon, above all. So long as the will of the great Knight King remains, Pendragon will always bring forth strong heroes...
"......"
A scolding, and a curse, heard by the child Tur when his master first took him in.
But looking at it now—
Master, you were quite a fine teacher, weren't you?
Ha.
The master he himself had killed had not been incompetent after all, but an excellent teacher, and Tur, realizing it only now, four hundred years later, burst out laughing before he knew it. He could not have said why. The laughter simply came.
Ah. To the very end, this is all I can be!
A being whose nature had been ruined from birth. A madman who, by blessed mana and inborn desire, had to possess everything. That was the human he was.
Tur—
CRACK!
"Heh heh!"
"...No mind to die quietly, I see."
"I don't like just dying. I've already earned a fairy's wrath, so my soul will suffer an eternity of torment in Hell. If I'm going to suffer anyway, better to do as I please on the way out, don't you think?"
"......"
"Oh, and if you can't stop me, the city is gone. I said it a moment ago, but I still—"
"—have about that much strength left, you see?"
He tore himself free of the vines that bound him. His entire lower body had turned to vine, so that only his upper half remained, and yet he flew on telekinesis and rushed them, as if he meant to have his way until the very end.
Clang!
Boom!
The two knights, watching the monster charge, were not surprised in the least as they raised sword and spear high. Because, in the end—
"I'll cut him."
"No. I will!"
What they wanted, too, was to kill him with their own hands at the last.
BOOM!!
......And what the three, men and women both, who had escaped the Magic Tower saw afterward was Lee Han, gasping, his sword driven through neck and heart, and Lark, whose face made it all too plain that he was, somehow, coming apart with frustration.