Everyone Has a Plan (2)
A warrior who had learned both Holy Law and the Fighting Art had not simply become as strong as one plus one.
Holy Power itself was a force akin to a Mystery, drawn forth through faith in the gods, through piety, and through steadfast prayer. The Holy Law born of it was, unlike the Fighting Art—which exacted a toll upon the body—no exaggeration to call power without a price.
A mighty strength, seized simply because one believed in a god! A knight who had taken Holy Law in hand was no longer merely a knight. It meant a knight who could wield even magic. Among the people of old there was even a history of looking upon such knights and calling them magic swordsmen.
Call them that in the present age, of course, and the holy knights would turn purple with rage. Even so, they had earned the name. A holy knight was a man who had grasped a power unlike that of any other knight—yes, a being fit to be set even beside the knight order of Galahad, the strongest in the kingdom.
……Surely, that was how it was.
Crack!
"Gyaaaah!"
Thud!
"Keuheok!"
Every time that three-meter whip came around—no, every time that person was swung—holy knights folded at the waist or went tumbling across the ground. Those were the better outcomes. The ones driven into the dirt, or bleeding from the head, looked to have taken wounds grave enough to be called serious.
The human body, it turned out, was surprisingly sturdy, and could even be used as a weapon: a fact they had never wanted to learn, and were now learning with their whole bodies. Against it, they were helpless.
It was not that the holy knights were weak.
Only—
M-my body is heavy...!
Why is the Holy Law like this...? No, more than that—why is my body this heavy!?
They could not bring their strength to bear as they usually did. It was like flailing underwater. The pressure lay on them with an unnatural weight, and their bodies would not move as they willed—the discomfort of iron weights clamped about wrists and ankles. Because of it, even Holy Law had become difficult to use.
"That Holy Law you use. To cast it, a prayer to the god comes first, doesn't it?"
And then their opponent explained why their bodies were heavy, and why they could not use Holy Law as they pleased. It was a humiliating sort of kindness.
"Inquisitors and holy knights travel in packs so their comrades can buy them time to recite the prayer. I heard that refusing them that time is how you take the upper hand against a user of Holy Law."
Fwoooosh!
"I was a little skeptical at first. Turns out it was true?"
Equivalent Exchange.
There was no power in the world without a price, and no power that was only convenient could exist. Even if that power was Holy Law, fail to meet its conditions and of course it would not answer.
"You—! What in the world are you doing!"
The holy knights screamed. They could grant that the bastard knew Holy Law well enough. What they could not understand, what threw them into sudden confusion, was by what means he was pressing down on them with a force this fierce.
He gave them no answer at all.
"Hmm. About forty of you left? That's a crowd, you lunatics."
Flat and calm, he only kept swinging his whip—the thing that had been a person—and the holy knights...
Splurt!
...had to spray their blood across the dirt once more.
Wow. I really can't see them.
If one misunderstanding of theirs needed correcting, it was this: he truly could neither see their shapes nor hear their voices. Whatever Holy Law it was, sound, appearance, even scent had been hidden completely. Unless one had learned Holy Law or magic, an ordinary person would have no way of seeing through a thing like that.
And so he simply had to—
Ah. Here?
—judge by instinct alone, and swing. By some chance—
Crack!
—those swings were landing at a rate close to nine in ten.
Nineteen.
A clean feel in the hand. Every time he struck something, that angler's tug—the sensation of a fish taking the line—climbed up through his fingertips. But instinct could not tell him everything, and Lee Han resorted to a trick.
"—Haap!"
Martial spirit, released not to rupture eardrums but to wash the whole forest like a sound wave.
It was a different use from his usual Lion's Roar, the kind that seemed fit to tear an opponent's eardrums apart: a method of spreading martial spirit across an entire space.
That spearman bastard. Useful at a time like this.
A technique he had thought of after watching the spearman scatter killing intent and seize the ground around him. Lee Han had no inexhaustible sea of killing intent to match the man's. What he had instead was martial spirit tempered over a long time, aged as if left to mature. Scatter that through the whole of the forest, and he could feel the presence of enemies he could not see. Press them with it, and he stole the concentration they needed to recite their prayers as well.
Works like ultrasound, too.
The quiet Lion's Roar spread like a wave and reported the positions and numbers of those in hiding. Had anyone seen it, they would have asked how a man who was not even a beast could sense sound waves. He would have answered thus.
...It just worked.
Thanks to that—
Thud!
Lee Han could pick out, without a moment's hesitation, where the ones charging him stood. Somewhere along the way he had let the human whip fall and was pounding them with his fists. As he grew used to the waves, catching their movements was no longer difficult, and he struck as lightly as if he were throwing jabs. It looked like nothing but shadowboxing, alone in an empty wood, and his movements only grew rougher.
Whoosh. Whoosh!
He never stopped his footwork. He never stopped advancing. His fists shot out faster.
Thud!
A left hook ignited, punched clean through a shield, and struck a face.
Crunch!
The next man seemed to block, for all the good it did him. The shield crumpled, and an uppercut shattered his jaw.
Whump!
A liver shot—a body blow that could show a man hell if it landed clean even once—pierced the armor exactly and hammered the organs beneath. Without the armor, the liver might truly have burst.
Simple techniques, thrown rough. Every time he thrashed, Lee Han's fists kept pounding empty air, and every time—
Splatter!
—blood sprayed across the ground, jawbones were pulverized, and sounds like bodies bursting from within rang out one after another. Come at him with sword or spear and he broke the weapon. Put everything into a shield and he broke that too.
One punch. One kill.
From some point on, the presences rushing him dwindled. Lee Han stopped where he stood and shook out his hands.
"This is the power of boxing, you medieval bastards."
In truth it was not the power of boxing at all, but simply the Weighted Strike Method. Still. If it worked, what did the name matter?
"How long you planning to spectate?"
—......
"Yeah, I'm talking to you. You with the giant shield."
—!?
"You look like the strongest one here. Gonna keep standing still? Till the rest of them drop? Hmm. If you're waiting on my stamina to give out, hate to break it to you, but I'm not even sweating. Look."
—!!!
As if taunting an opponent he could not see, Lee Han showed a forehead that truly had not shed a single drop of sweat. Sure enough, the taunt seemed to land. The man's presence went plainly a little hot, and Lee Han felt him start to step forward, only to be held back by his comrades.
Right. So the one casting this unseen Holy Law is him.
From the way of it, Lee Han could roughly guess why the strongest presence refused to move: that the man might be the one maintaining the Holy Law which hid their forms, and that he might be someone considerably important. Those two pieces of information.
And so.
"Thanks. For spelling it out."
Lee Han hooked a fallen flail up with his foot and set himself like a man about to kick a ball.
It could not, as its name claimed, pierce the sun. A castle wall, it would run through with room to spare.
"—All of you, fall back! Now!"
Erhin screamed the order and raised his giant shield. A blow of chilling momentum came down to swallow him, and he unfolded his Holy Law at once.
Unbreakable Fortress
A holy art said to have withstood even the assault of a great demon—now borne by one man alone.
It was not meant to be cast alone. A Great Holy Law required ten people or more, but there was no longer any room to ask the others for help. Only the time his comrades had bought, falling as they did, had let him barely finish the prayer and force the rite into being.
"Kkeuuuugh!!"
Erhin de Loengrin. One of the prodigies on whom the kingdom itself pinned its hopes, a man called the White Swan of Loengrin. Always at ease, never losing his dignity—but in this moment dignity and all the rest were thrown aside, and he felt as if he would suffocate.
The backlash of casting a Great Holy Law alone was bad enough. Worse was the overwhelming momentum crashing over him, before which his body simply could not hold. Blood vessels stood out in his eyes, and at last the blood burst and dyed them red. He clenched his teeth so hard his molars cracked and his skin split. For less than half a second, under the dazed illusion that a human body could be this frail, Erhin even blacked out.
But his will alone, as if it refused to break, would not let go of a single thought.
I block it. I block it no matter what! I will not be pierced!
Holy Law was the power of faith. The greater the faith, and the less the doubt toward one's god, the mightier that power became. So he did not doubt, and in the end he was certain he could hold. He would be no different from a wall that could never be pierced—
"—Ah. So that's what you look like."
"......?"
"Bastard. Look at that face. Bet you make girls cry. Too bad, though. Both arms just flew off."
"......"
"Holy Law grow your arms back too? Ah, I'm asking because I actually want to know."
"Kkeugh...!"
Erhin could give no answer. He only looked at his shield, already gone, and at both arms, vanished as if erased, and only then—
"Aaaaaagh......!"
—could he do nothing but scream in pain. As if to show that the wings of that lofty swan—no, his faith—had long since snapped.
The wall had not overcome Piercing-One.
...Belatedly. No. They had come running at full strength less than five minutes after it began, and still it was already over.
"Hah... hah... haaah."
"Oh. You're here?"
Derek and Roen. The two boys had no room to answer their master's casual greeting. One glance at the wretched scene, and a groan slipped out of them.
A dry rustle. Men with arms and legs bent at the wrong angles. Men bleeding through shattered armor. Even a giant folded at the waist, with barely a breath left in him. These were not third-rate thugs. They were holy knights whose renown rang through the kingdom, and every one of them had fallen in a state where no one could say when he might die.
"...Fifty holy knights..."
"......"
Exactly fifty-two. Seven-tenths of the holy knight order's full strength had moved, and for the order itself it was a blow little short of annihilation. More absurd still was that a single man had put that force down. They were surely not weak. So how...
"Stop them using Holy Law and they're about the same grade as those White Cats. These ones too?"
"You mean the Holy Law?"
"Disappointing. Makes you wonder if a man can fall off this far just because he can't use a little Holy Law. Or did they lean on it so hard their actual skill rotted?"
The young-master brats would have been better than this.
That was the instructor's plain, honest review, and the two boys could only find his manner—like a man leaving a review of a popular eatery—beyond belief. In the next moment, though, something else was more absurd still.
"...In the first place, Holy Law is not something that can be blocked. How did you manage it?"
"Just... like this?"
Fwoosh!
...The unbelievable trick he showed them.
"......"
"See? Like this. ...Huh? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"...Because it defies belief. How in the world..."
"—D-Dragon Fear!"
"?"
"S-so that's it. You were none other than the White Lion of Pendragon! It was the power of the dragon bloodline. That was why the Holy Law...! Damn it! I ought to have been more careful!"
"??"
The lamenting mutter of Erhin, both arms gone. The two boys blinked, concluding the man was not in his right mind. What in the world was he raving about?
And to a man like that—
"Nobles sure do love a bloodline. This is why you noble bastards are the way you are. Tsk."
"...Why are you looking at me when you say that?"
"You're a noble too, aren't you?"
"......I will say it again."
Please stop hating nobles.
...It's frightening.