A Knight Begins Anew (4)
It was a sight so sudden, so utterly dumbfounding, that it left them staring blank.
Only moments before, they had been listening with warm hearts to the evacuation manual, and meeting Sir Lark—a knight counted among the finest in the kingdom—had sent a wave of feeling rolling through them. And now this. What in the—
BOOOOM!
"!?"
"H-he's not even blocking!?"
"Th-that sound... that's someone getting hit in the face...?"
The confusion was put down quickly. By force. Anyone who saw a sight like that would startle, then startle all over again in an entirely different way, shock carving itself into the face.
BOOOOOOM!
An indiscriminate beating. Blows to the face, defense abandoned altogether. One might have called it careless hitting.
"...That is absolutely not a sound you get from hitting carelessly..."
It rang like a hammer striking plate armor. A sound that crawled the spine, and every time that crash landed, bodies flinched on reflex. They could have sworn it: take a fist like that to the face, and the bridge of the nose would collapse, the jaw would shatter. The beating carried that much force, and the flinching it wrung out of them lasted exactly until—
Ding.
"Five minutes have passed."
The bell rang, and it was over.
Young Master Roen—no one could say how long he had been standing there—struck the bell, and the two knights froze exactly as they were, still poised to hit each other. Blood trickled. Someone spat.
Blood ran down their faces, from noses and mouths, and the features dyed red looked agonizingly sore. And yet, after a beating like that, they looked comparatively intact, which was its own shock to the students. They had expected cheekbones to cave in at the very least. It had ended at little more than light bruising.
And then—
"Hoo. Blood's finally moving."
"Insolent ruffian. Don't you dare hold back!"
"If I hadn't held back, your head would've come off."
"You bastard...!"
—What are they saying?
They doubted their own ears. What had they just heard?
Holding back...?
That was?
It struck them all over again, a serious question shared by everyone present: was the instructor teaching them even human? And if he was a person—
What is that? That's terrifying....
—then that was terrifying in its own right.
This bastard's fists sting. Mean as poison.
Blood dripped.
He could feel it plainly: this one, too, had grown a full step beyond the day before. Their first meeting had been a striking match as well. Even then he had thought the fellow threw a fairly sharp fist, and that he was decent enough. Now it was different. It was not merely sharp. Weight had settled into it. And because of that—
There's still some shock left in me.
Lee Han's peculiar regeneration had already closed the bruises, but the fact that the residual impact had not fully cleared drew a quiet admiration from him. Of course, he had been consciously forcing himself not to use Diamond Body, which made dissipating the blows that much harder. But this was a process he needed right now.
And so was the other man.
"Are you insulting me, you wretch? You will not even use that grotesque technique—!"
"Look who's talking. You're suppressing your killing intent too."
"......"
He's the same, though.
Lee Han snorted. Holding back himself, and still finding room to nag.
"I'm holding back Diamond Body and my strength. You're holding back your momentum and your technique. Same thing, isn't it?"
"...Ahem."
Lee Han knew just how exceptional a technician this man was. Hundreds of defensive arts and deflection techniques, at the very least, and he had taken every one of those hundreds to the level of a true master. If he set his mind to it, he could shed even the hardest blow Lee Han threw. In the language of martial tales, a master of the soft overcoming the hard?
A man with no great constitution, able to eat that many spells from a mage and still get back on his feet—that had to be thanks to a talent like this.
Talent to spare, this one.
Add in the inborn aura of a killer, and he was a genius of a different measure even among those called geniuses. Which was how Lee Han knew the man had been holding back in the first round. Not out of consideration for him, and not for the sake of a fair fight. This one, just like himself—
"You can't control your strength either, can you?"
"......"
"Thought so. Strange that you came when I called. You're not the type."
"...This thing they call a blessing is a far greater headache than I expected."
Lark had no choice but to admit it. He was not the sort who could stay shameless once he had been seen through. He only clicked his tongue, a touch of sullenness on his face.
"Hell of a personality."
A shift of the feet. With that short exchange done, Lee Han and he settled back into their stances. Talk was fine, but—
Ding!
A minute had passed. Time to start again, wasn't it?
The two knights swung their fists once more.
If he had to put his present condition into words—
A locomotive with no brakes?
Yes. That was exactly how Lee Han saw himself right now.
What is this. I'm not some runaway train....
People meeting him for the first time usually took him for a brute who fought on raw muscle alone. In truth he was the sort who mixed control of force—heavy and light, fast and slow—with the right technique, and subdued his opponent that way. Precisely because his strength outstripped others, he had been forced to learn how to govern it. The effort he had poured into that control was enormous. From his assassin days he had worked without rest to master the governing of strength, and even in the mercenary years, when he had lived more or less carelessly, regulating his power had remained a required task.
...And now, rendering all of that effort meaningless, the brakes were broken. That was the problem.
The fairy gave me a troublesome gift.
He had fully expected his body to change after undergoing Bone Reforging. That it would be this bad was his honest feeling.
Whoosh!
Damn it. My senses are a wreck too.
Controlling his strength was a problem, yes. The greater problem was that his senses kept lurching up and down. It was like a dog that used to obey him perfectly had hit puberty overnight and started baring its teeth. Literally.
...Pathetic enough to make a man cry.
Lee Han smiled bitterly. But there was a reason he could not call it purely bad. Namely—
CRACK!
"Did you just break my technique?"
"I didn't. My body broke it on its own."
"...You say the maddest things. Have you finally lost your mind?"
"I think this every time we meet. You've got a real foul mouth."
"You—!"
A new function had been installed. How could he see it as only a bad thing? This time Lark seemed to have meant to use the method of the soft overcoming the hard, but Lee Han's strike cut that flow clean through. It was not a feat that had been possible for him before. A method only a genius could manage. And yet the physical ability and senses he possessed after Bone Reforging displayed a skill for dismantling an opponent's technique. The body had grown so good that there was no longer any need to use the head at all.
Lee Han was not glad of the gift in the slightest.
What use is a gun I can't control?
This was no different from a malfunctioning firearm. Powerful, certainly, but with no telling when, or how, it might cause an accident.
I've been reset. That's what this is.
He might crush those weaker than himself. Against someone of equal skill, or greater, it could only become a fatal flaw. His control over bodily strength had grown crude, and a severe gap had opened in his senses. It was nothing less than a man who knew how to use chopsticks, who knew how to ride a bicycle, being forced to learn both from the very beginning again.
Still, there was a positive side.
If I've forgotten, I just learn it again.
Chopsticks, or a bicycle: once the body has learned them, it never truly forgets. Adapting to this newly changed body and these senses, working until he could move them as he willed—that could only be an essential task. If he set his mind to it and worked for a month or two, he was certain he could get a feel for it.
...The catch, if it could be called a catch, was that he did not have two months to spare.
Who knows when the next fanatic, or the next lunatic mage, will show up.
So he needed to adjust his body's abilities and senses in a short time, and for that he felt the need for sparring. Not ordinary sparring. Sparring that required an opponent of similar skill, one he had to fight with every last scrap of strength in him. And for good reason.
BOOOOM!
"That blow got lighter. If you're going to regulate your strength that poorly, don't you know you're better off not trying?"
"And you? Couldn't even shed one light hit, so you bled from the nose and ate dirt?"
"...This time I will kill you."
"Try it."
CRUNCH!
THOOM!
—Because the more the sparring resembled real combat, the more he could feel his body's condition improving. On top of that, a fighting spirit boiled up—I refuse to lose to that bastard!—and Lee Han forced the discord in his flesh and senses into line all the harder. Wasn't it said that a single experience is worth more than a hundred pieces of advice? A fistfight that might as well have been the real thing was the very moment that let him shake off, quickly, a dissonance that should have taken months.
Flash!
From a certain moment on, Lee Han and Lark were no longer fighting with fists alone. Feet, knees, elbows—dangerous points, of course—and joint locks as well, used without restraint.
CRACK!
BANG!
They tumbled over each other, the advantage shifting again and again, and every time they locked a technique the ground around them was reduced to a wreck.
RUMBLE!
Each time Lee Han landed a blow, the earth shook and dust rose thick.
SHIIING!
Each time Lark's strike swept the area, a keen blade-wind covered everything around them, leaving vivid marks on rock and tree. It was a fierce fight in which it would not have been strange for either of them to die, and in the instant they meant to settle it—!
Ding!
"...Five minutes have passed."
"——."
"Furthermore, you have passed ten rounds. How long do you intend to continue?"
The bell rang again. A soft patter as debris settled.
As the thick dust cleared, what emerged was Lee Han in a full mount, and Lark with the edge of his hand aimed at that throat. Had Lee Han's hammer of a fist driven into the face, the brain would have been pulp. Had Lark's blade-like hand touched the neck, the carotid would certainly have been cut.
In the end—
"Please stop fighting. At this rate, one of you will die."
"We don't die from just this."
"That much is true."
"Ordinary people do...."
"?"
"?"
"...Please. I ask that you not go around telling people you are human."
From time to time, the regressor found himself doubting whether those two were people of the same kind as himself at all.