Everyone Has a Plan (1)
No matter how luxurious or vast a mansion or a tower might be, it could never be without its flaws. Dust and gnats cannot all be done away with, and in the places where not even a thread of sunlight reaches, the filth only lies thicker. That is why cleaning must never be taken lightly, and why no one pays a cleaning service good money for nothing. You may swear you scrubbed every corner yourself, and still have no idea where the dirt will come crawling out from. In that sense—
"Hard to believe it's already been more than thirteen years since I graduated from the Academy."
"You were an Academy man?"
"Top of the swordsmanship faculty."
"…Must have been a thin year for talent."
"Sir!?"
"A joke."
And in a place as vast as the Academy, the filth that crept in—the so-called rats—could only be more numerous still. The eastern district was broad enough to call a city to mind: a stretch of dense woodland, rich in rare herbs and timber, a place that almost no one visited unless they belonged to the alchemy faculty or the magic faculty. On a day like today, with the entrance examinations underway, it was emptier still, and all the better for an outsider to slip into. And yet, even if someone did walk into those woods, they would never realize that anyone was already there.
And for good reason.
"No one around who could notice Holy Law, I trust?"
"The nun in the infirmary is skilled enough, but not skilled enough to sense ours."
Wooong.
Holy Law. A sacred art that only those who served the Light of Radiance—priests and nuns—could learn. Some called it holy magic, and the name was earned: the varieties of Holy Law were that many. For these men to be using it was as good as announcing, outright, that they belonged to the temple.
That they would cast such a thing even while already hidden in the forest said everything about how thoroughly they prepared for every contingency. And those who could wield this Holy Law with such fluency existed in only two places in all the temple. One was the heretic inquisitors, called the temple's hunting dogs, who lived chiefly in the dark. The other worked in the temple's light, heaping up more glory and honor than any ordinary order of knights: sacred knights clad in white armor. Their affiliation was easy to name from the plate alone. White armor, and the swan engraved upon it, announced exactly who they were.
"Captain, do we really have to go this far?"
"What's the matter? Pride stung?"
"…If I said it wasn't, I'd be lying."
"Put that pride away. For now. Recovering the temple's glory matters more than any one man's honor."
"Is this actually possible?"
"You think it isn't?"
"I understand the plan itself. But the question is whether we can fool Galahad, isn't it?"
"It should be… possible."
"…?"
"There's a way."
"You don't sound very sure, if I'm honest. Not like you…."
"…Quiet."
The captain did not elaborate. However much they were his own men, he could not lay every confidential matter out before them. There was also the simpler fact that explaining all of it would only stir up objections, and he could not be bothered. But the men who knew none of this had no choice but to show how put out they were.
"This is too much. Honestly."
Victor, the Holy Knight who boasted a frame of three full meters, grumbled. He respected the captain, and yet every time this much was kept from him he felt stifled, and a little wounded besides.
"Victor, is that any way to speak to the captain?"
"And why do you only scold me, senior? Tch."
"You little—!"
The two knights snarled at each other, and the captain did not stop them. He did not need them to say it. Holy Knights of their standing could hardly be pleased to be out here doing all this merely to escort a single woman. Of course, the man nursing that grievance felt the same.
If it weren't the family head's order, I wouldn't be obeying either.
The more he thought about it, the more absurd it became.
A plan to birth a Saint….
Ridiculous. A plan to bring forth by human hands a sacred existence called a child of God? Honestly, he thought it was nonsense. None other than—
"You meant to send a woman carrying Duke Blake's blood in close to the duke, and afterward have the temple announce it. 'Hayes Roche is actually your daughter.'"
"……."
Erhin de Loengrin, captain of the Holy Knight order, snapped his eyes wide at the third voice ringing through the trees. It was not the appearance of a third party that shocked him. What stunned Erhin was the way that voice recited the temple's plan, as if it had looked straight into his guts. And the owner of the voice was not finished. He went on, as though there were still more to say.
"Hell of a funny plan. Blake isn't the sort of man you take lightly, and he isn't the sort who'll meekly believe you just because the temple waves some evidence at him. …Still, if the woman claiming to be his daughter has the power of a Dream Fiend, then this plan has some chance of actually working. The power of a Mystery would get through to him. Barely. But it would."
Step by step, the man came walking easily into the woods. He wore no armor at all—only a sword hung carelessly at his hip, and a single axe slung across his back. By all rights the Holy Law of the Veil should have left nothing to see, and yet he stared straight toward where they hid, as if the men concealed there were plain before his eyes.
"…From here on it's only my guess, but I figure you temple bastards need three things in all. One: Hayes Roche gets into Galahad without a hitch. Two: you use the Dream Fiend's power to lay a suggestion on Duke Blake, little by little, until he starts treating Hayes Roche like his own daughter. Three: you borrow Galahad's influence and make Hayes Roche a Saint. …And if you can scoop up the Magic Sword's power while you're at it, so much the better."
"……."
"A plan that doesn't even make sense. …No. It's closer to a gamble than a plan. But gambling and investing are a hair apart, so I suppose you go in clinging to the hope that maybe, just maybe, it'll work. Looking at you now, you temple bastards were born cardsharps, weren't you?"
"…So he can see us."
"But that's the thing about gambling, isn't it? Everything's fifty-fifty. Hah—now that I think about it, it's kind of impressive. Pulling off a plan this brainless, and the ones pulling it off being the so-called elites… So the ones who run the world really are the lunatics?"
"He can't see us, then."
The man only kept talking. He gave no reaction at all to Erhin's question. Proof that the Holy Law of the Veil, which shut out even sound, was working exactly as it should. And so—
"Victor. Deal with him."
"Kill him?"
"What else?"
"…You really are thorough, Captain."
Victor had been full of complaints, but the instant Erhin's order fell he lifted his warhammer without a single one left. Victor Volv, the Warhammer Saint. In raw strength he was first in the Holy Knight order—no, a Holy Knight who could credibly aim at being first in the kingdom—and he brought his Holy Law to bear.
Holy Law of Monstrous Strength
Body magnified. Explosive force, granted in an instant.
KRAK-KRAK-KRAK! It raised his physical ability some tenfold to twentyfold, and granted a burst of explosive strength on top of that. Nor was he a man of Holy Law alone. He was a knight who had properly mastered Fighting Art as well. In truth, it was fair to say that nothing existed which could stop his warhammer. Once, in the past, he had caved in an ogre's skull in a single blow. And worse still, thanks to the Holy Law of the Veil, the attack could neither be seen nor heard. There was no way to block it. Victor's warhammer blurred through the air and came crashing down on the man's head—
Splutch!
"……?"
For a moment, Victor could not understand what had happened. And no wonder.
Huh? Why is my arm bent?
He was the one who had attacked, and yet he could not grasp why his own arm was dangling loose. To the man wearing that baffled look, the answer came easily.
"If I put it the way they do back in Taechang, this one dumped every point into the Strength stat and didn't invest a damn thing in Technique or Intelligence."
Thud.
"Guhk—!"
Victor's body flipped over as it was.
"Let me explain what you just got hit with, nice and simple. I took your own strength and turned it back on you. How's that possible? Learn action and reaction."
"GAAAAH!"
"What's the point of being able to swing hard if your head's just decoration?"
KRRRCH!
Victor would rather not have known. That a body of his, more than three meters tall, could be lifted so lightly—and that his waist could fold like a shrimp. He was a man who often heard that he lacked flexibility, but no one looking at him now would have said so. He was bent that thoroughly, and then—
CRACK!
His spine, the bones of his back, shattered to pieces. So emptily that there was no way left to put him back together. Victor Volv. The hollow defeat of the Warhammer Saint, whose fame had stood apart even within the order—and the moment he was left paralyzed, half his body dead.
"V-Victor!"
"Damn it!"
"You dare lay a hand on a Holy Knight…!"
The Holy Knights, struck dumb by Victor's empty defeat, spat their rage and charged, as if they would never let the man who had touched their comrade walk away.
"Stop!"
But Erhin, sensing something deeply wrong, tried to halt his men. It was an instinctive judgment that they must not move rashly. He was the one who believed that now, of all times, they had to keep their heads. Stopping men once they had been worked up, however, was no easy thing. More than ten of them charged just as they were, and then—
"Why is there so much trash?"
FWOOOSH!
As it happened, Lee Han already had a three-meter weapon in his hand.
Nice and soft.
He swung it with all the vigor of a whip.
That day, the Holy Knights learned something they had never wanted to learn. That a human body can be used as a weapon, and that it can prove sturdier than most weapons. A fact they had not wanted to know in the slightest.