The Knight Hates Rofan Events (2)
"About time something finally blew up."
A month had passed since the headaches known as the sultan and the spell-monger vanished. Lee Han had spent it doing everything he could to stay out of troublesome problems, dumping the fanatics and every other mess wholesale onto his royal elder sister.
Which had produced the following.
"Wretched boy. You meant to work this sister of yours to the bone, did you?"
"We are merely dividing the work according to what each of us does well. If a mere common knight such as myself went about thrusting himself forward, would that not be viewed even more poorly? I, too, have a place in society to maintain."
"...The most shameless excuse I have heard all year."
"It is founded entirely upon fact, though?"
"......Impudent brat."
He had been obliged to swallow every last complaint, but that was none of his concern. He had done what she asked. What more could she possibly want?
Typical. People with power have no conscience. Not a scrap.
And so Lee Han had shoved every duty onto someone else and, for the past month, devoted himself solely to reconciling the gap between his body and his senses, never once glancing elsewhere. A peaceful daily life, in the most literal sense.
Yet Lee Han knew. This peace was the stillness before the storm.
The clouds of war still haven't cleared.
It was the air of a battlefield, the sort an ordinary person would scarcely notice. That heavy atmosphere still prowled around him, and he was certain an incident would break at any moment. Leave a small spark untended and you get a great fire; even a little trouble, he knew, would swell into a crisis.
Tsk.
...Just once, I wish a feeling would end as only a feeling.
Lee Han clicked his tongue. Now and then that intuition made him proud. The trouble was that it was right about the ill omens too, and his face creased of its own accord.
"Haa. I was so annoyed I finished the whole thing in a flash."
He set the needle and the handkerchief down with a dull tap. Somewhere amid his wandering thoughts, today's "training" had come to an end.
The young ladies who saw the result—
"...I-Instructor, th-that's incredible...! To render fish in embroidery so accurately, and in an instant...!"
"And the finish, the splendor—it's truly...!"
They spared no praise, marveling at the masterpiece. Dynamic fish had been stitched dense and fine across the cloth; had noblewomen laid eyes on it, they would gladly have named a price of thirty gold coins. Simply setting more than a hundred lively fish upon that small handkerchief was already an absurd display of skill.
"I-in barely half a month, he's surpassed us..."
"...Heavens."
"Th-this is talent...!"
They were noble girls who had been taught embroidery from the age of three, and yet his skill—producing a magnificent piece in less than a fortnight—left them with a deep sense of defeat. A handkerchief of fish they might have shrugged off. Looking at embroidery that rendered even a dragon's scales and a phoenix's feathers stitch by stitch, and another that held an entire grassland, they felt the wall of talent.
"Unlike you, I've got tough fingers. So don't praise me too much. I'll pick up a bad habit."
Lee Han was a man whose hide was so tough that needle and thread could scrape and stab him all they liked without a hint of pain. Sewing had also been mandatory in every organization he belonged to, in his past life and this one alike. When your own clothes tore, there was no one to mend them for you; you got good whether you wanted to or not. A bleak history, perhaps, but thanks to it embroidery had not been especially difficult to learn, and with senses and hands that were nothing to scoff at, getting ahead of the girls had been no great challenge. All it took was grinding away, blindly and stubbornly.
A training method that suited me perfectly.
To learn control of his strength, delicate work that demanded concentration had seemed better than hoisting dumbbells or iron bars. Besides the embroidery, he had already piled up such feats as making teddy bears and knitting a hundred sweaters and mufflers. Training through something productive was enjoyable in its own way, and the finer the work, the finer the "piece" that emerged. For Lee Han, it was a thoroughly satisfying method.
"Thanks to you, I think I've learned how to control my strength pretty well. I don't know if this counts as thanks, but split the embroidery, the sweaters, and the dolls among yourselves. ...If you want them, that is."
Wondering whether anyone would actually want something a man had made, Lee Han shrugged.
But—
"Lady Rose! Kindly keep your hands to yourself. Since when do you pocket five of them!"
"I-I haven't the faintest idea what you mean..."
"Hah! So that's how you're going to play it? Ha! Fine. We'll settle this with fencing."
"...Oh? You dare challenge me to fencing? I hate to say it, but aside from Lady Levi, I am confident I rank second among the female students."
"You only know the long and the short of it once you try. Or are you getting cold feet?"
"......Bring the fleurets. Now!"
The girls seized their fencing swords and fell into a scramble over the masterpieces the knight had made, and Lee Han blinked.
A budding grandmaster who did not even realize he had produced masterpieces.
"You possessed an unexpected talent, Instructor."
"...I still can't tell if this is worth fighting over. Well. I do like how fired up they are about the spar."
Nobles, sure enough. Whether because they had learned fencing as a polite accomplishment from childhood, their fundamentals were properly set, and they had absorbed his teaching so thoroughly that he nearly sighed in admiration at their considerable skill. It was fierce enough that he worried they might take cuts or bruises.
"There's Holy Law. Should be fine."
Sacrifice Barrier
A low, resonant hum spread over the grounds.
That was the name of the holy art the interns had opened, and so long as it held, the children could train or fight with almost no chance of being hurt. Reassured, Lee Han watched the match, and partway through he spoke.
"So. What's with you talking first? Something giving you a headache?"
"When you phrase it that way, the nuance is that I address you only when I have business."
"Don't you?"
"......"
"You've got a serious shortage of conscience yourself."
"...Ahem."
He looked endlessly cold and taciturn, and yet there was a surprising pleasure in needling him; the black-haired young lord quietly averted his gaze. Then again, if the boy had any conscience of his own, speaking first would feel like having none. Roen: a cheeky disciple for whom pretending they were strangers was as good as a passive skill.
"So why did our young lord deign to speak?"
"...Address me as you usually do. You are going to upset my stomach."
"Fussy."
"......"
"All right. I'll stop teasing you."
"......Jack."
A soft rustle. How long had he been hiding? Or perhaps he had been there from the very beginning, his presence so faint that no one had known he existed, until a certain student revealed himself.
Except—
"I was wondering why you kept standing there. Don't tell me you were trying to startle me."
"Pardon?"
"Tsk! I keep telling you to practice swordsmanship, not stealth."
Unfortunately, the boy's skill was not yet enough to deceive Lee Han's senses. If anything, Lee Han scolded him for investing in something other than the sword. Beneath the downpour of nagging, Jack offered a wronged excuse.
"...I-I am training hard as well. It is only that the stealth art improves on its own even if I leave it be..."
"...That's clearly an obnoxious thing to say, and yet I feel sorry for you?"
"Do not pity me..."
Jack, whose talent as an assassin grew merely from breathing, sagged into a miserable look—and yet his inborn diligence had not gone anywhere. He drew several photographs from his coat and held them out.
"...?"
"Please look at them first."
"...Hm."
At their words Lee Han gave the photographs a glance, and for an instant a chill passed through his eyes, vanishing just as quickly.
A flinch.
It had lasted only a heartbeat, but lord and vassal both jerked. Merely feeling how much his presence had grown was enough to chill the blood. Unaware of it, Lee Han studied the photographs in earnest. The resolution was quite poor, but not so poor that the people and places were unrecognizable, and he spoke with perfect calm.
"Geomdung. Stalking is still a crime, you bastard."
"......"
He only looked back and forth between the photographs—apparently of Judia Pierre—and the boy himself, wearing a pitying expression.
Judia Pierre.
A biological woman who usually went about dressed as a man; a being of two personalities; an inquisitor called both the temple's hunting dog and its hyena. She was also the one who had threatened Lee Han the other day and been thoroughly thrashed for it.
Dig a little deeper, though, and inquisitor was not the only line on her record.
A race that could enter the dreams of others and replenish its energy by devouring the vital essence of human beings, man and woman alike. And though the future was not certain, she was also one of the kingdom's three great villainesses yet to come—the woman who would use that power to carry a marriage with Geomdung all the way through and deal him a terrible blow.
A career as gaudy as they came, and yet no one yet considered her a dangerous element. Which stood to reason. No one knew her evils. The only people who did, besides himself, numbered two: one was the bastard with the System Window, and the other was the man who had gone so far as to marry the villainess...
"Still overflowing with leftover feelings, I see?"
"...It is not like that."
...because the only one left was the regressor, Geomdung.
Lee Han looked with distaste at the photographs that had captured Judia Pierre's movements in full. They showed her meeting people and speaking with them, and no matter how he looked, it was nothing but stalking.
...If someone who didn't know the story saw these, reporting them on the spot wouldn't be strange at all.
He could let it pass because he knew what lay between Geomdung and Judia Pierre. To anyone else it was textbook stalker behavior, and if it came to light, Geomdung's social standing would suffer in more ways than one. Lee Han sighed and flipped on through the photographs.
"Why show me something this ugly? If anyone but me had seen it, they'd have misunderstood you a dozen times over and still had misunderstandings left."
"I show them to you because I trust you, Instructor. And you are aware, are you not? That I loathe her exceedingly, and keep the strictest watch upon her..."
"I know. ...I know, which is why I worry more."
He worried the boy might drag her down into some deep cellar as soon as tomorrow and start in on the torture. Hatred that fierce had to be sleeping in the brat's gut.
...This is why you have to break up properly.
Quit a job you hate and, calling it revenge, delete the important documents on your way out, and your life drops straight into hell mode. There was an aesthetic even to parting. Make the parting filthy, and the only life that grew miserable was your own.
Well. If you were prepared for your own life to get filthy enough, a filthy breakup was permitted.
In that sense—
This one looks like he wants to see it through to the end.
"—Instructor. Hand her over to my side, even now. She is, as I thought, not a person who can be mended and put to use."
Geomdung—no, Roen—glared, determined to end Judia Pierre's life by whatever means he could, and Lee Han scratched the back of his head.
I knew an incident was coming. Is the engine finally turning over?
The people in the photographs he had been shown all looked like people of the temple, and Lee Han felt it in his gut: his peaceful days were running out.
This is why I hate medieval religion.
They never did the worship they were supposed to do. They only pulled strange stunts.
If he cracked them across the back of the head, would they come to their senses?