The Knights' Night Raid (2)
Lee Han was a knight with a checkered career, and if any line on it could be called truly strange, there was no contest.
Assassin.
It was the sort of history that would make most people blanch if they ever heard it. A knight who had once been an assassin was rare enough to see, and harder still to believe. Not that Lee Han had ever gone through his days trembling at the thought of being found out. It was not a past he particularly hid. He did not stroll about announcing that he used to be an assassin, but most of the people close to him knew anyway.
There was another reason he could admit it without flinching.
"I never actually killed anyone. Why wouldn't I hold my head up?"
He had certainly been raised as an assassin, but the order collapsed before he ever properly began the work, and almost by accident he found himself free. The result was a half-made assassin: the arts learned, and not a single life taken. After that he climbed the mercenary tree, then the kingdom-soldier tree, and somewhere along the way he discarded most of the killing techniques.
Even so.
I didn't throw away the knowledge, too.
Assassination had never been only combat. What the order had drilled even harder were the arts of infiltration, scouting, and reading poison, along with every other trick of espionage and spycraft. Looking back, Black Moon had probably wanted him not merely as a fighter, but as something closer to a ranger as well. At the time it had only felt as if they taught him every useless thing under the sun.
"Ah. Found it."
This, he supposed, was what people meant when they said that anything you learned would prove useful someday.
Five hours and forty-five minutes. That was what it had cost him to find a way into the Grand Temple.
Well. A way in.
"Hell of a current on this river."
Fall in, and drowning looked like the likely end of it.
Information about the Grand Temple was controlled with absolute rigor.
What did that mean? Put simply, almost nothing about the place was known, and it did not even appear on maps. He knew how much that sounded like colossal nonsense. There was a reason for it. Sacred Relics slept within the Grand Temple, along with the tombs and steles of the kingdom's great heroes, and a library of a hundred thousand volumes besides. Every culturally priceless heritage of the realm was gathered there, and if the Royal Capital were ever breached in war, the Grand Temple bore the duty of protecting all of it.
So the maps gave no geographic location for the temple, and even if such a chart existed, no one short of the army's supreme commander or the king himself could lay hands on the map that depicted the whole of the kingdom. Not even a high noble.
Except.
"Even I can't get you the map. I can tell you what kind of place the Grand Temple is."
Among his connections was a princess who stood all but at the summit of this country, and thanks to her he had been able to carve knowledge of the Grand Temple — knowledge that ranked as a secret of the highest order — into his memory.
"To the eye it takes the form of a vast sanctuary, but in truth it is a fortress of iron walls. A barrier wrought of Holy Law wraps the temple every hour of the day, and that barrier reaches from the underground all the way above the clouds."
A knight of Lee Han's caliber could break a barrier like that without much trouble. Breaking it, however, would be the act of a fool standing in the open and announcing that he meant to invade the temple. He could not go in through the front.
"And even setting the barrier aside, it was carved out of a mountain, so it has every impregnable quality of a fortress. To other eyes it merely looks holy, and austere."
Nor was that all. Because it had been cut from the mountain, the ways in were few, and routes an intruder might use were practically nonexistent.
"Broad fields and abundant water lie inside the Grand Temple, enough for them to feed themselves. Even if an enemy penetrated Pendragon and set their sights on the temple, they could hold for a full year with no support from outside."
A fortress beloved by Holy Law and by nature's own favor. Small wonder they kept every kind of relic there.
However.
"Abundant water, you said? Is there groundwater, or a river running through it?"
"There is a river."
"Hoh..."
"Don't. That is not a wise method."
"...I didn't say anything."
"You meant to slip in by the river, didn't you?"
"......I told you to stop reading my mind. Seriously."
Nothing in the world was perfect.
And so, at present—
"I only came to look at some damned river and nearly had a heart attack.... Why are they this thorough?"
In the space of five hours Lee Han had worn himself down to the bone. All he had tried to do was approach along the river, and the number of people guarding its banks was enough to make him flinch.
Even now.
Bark! Bark!
Grrrrr!
Though it was the dead of night, several hundred men held an ironclad defense, and war dogs howled savagely among them. If he had not moved by digging his way along in stretches on the road to the river, he would have been caught long since.
This is the force they gathered to guard a single temple? ...This isn't a temple. It's the Pentagon.
Absurd. Stricter than the Royal Castle. And at the same time, impressive.
He had lost every assassin's technique, but Lee Han was armed with a different set no less formidable. With Air Walk, the knack of digging through earth, and Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow alone, he could become a bird, or he could become a mole. And yet all of it was rendered pointless. The temple's troops aimed arrows even at birds in flight, and with a thoroughness that suspected the ground itself, they went so far as to drive longspears into the earth by hand, one by one.
He half expected them to set the forest alight next. Still, a temple was a temple. They stopped short of shaving mountain and field down to bare earth.
Right. They do say the Light of Radiance governs life as well.
They would not casually ruin nature. For a faith that governed life, mind you, they seemed to treat human lives like straw. But anyway.
Lee Han mustered every technique, every scrap of knowledge and experience he possessed, and at last reached the lake that served as the temple's water source. Soldiers were still posted all around it.
I am a turtle. A turtle......
He kept moving in secret, killing his presence to the utmost.
Didn't they say a turtle's heartbeat was as slow as its walk?
Slow. Slower. Slower still....
Six beats a minute. Set against an ordinary human heart at sixty a minute, or a hundred, it was hard to believe such a thing was possible. A pulse as slow as a turtle's crawl — and yet, remembering that this slow heartbeat was the reason turtles lived so long, it was not something to laugh off.
And—
It's working. It's working!
Apply a turtle's breathing, its gait, and the motion of its heart to a human body, and the effect was astonishing. A method possible only because he could loosen muscle and organ at will.
Hoo.... Haa...... ——Hoo....
Shaaaa—
The corpse-still breath. Presence severed. A living man, playing dead.
Among the people of the murim it was a secret art that was not quite a secret, ordinarily kept for playing dead — the perfect corpse-act. In this moment Lee Han had raised it into a technique for espionage.
Total erasure of presence. He melted completely into the dark, and no one knew a man was crawling through that place. Even so he was faster and nimbler than any turtle, and the farther he went, fused with his surroundings, the fewer people noticed that he existed at all. Until he was walking blatantly past five soldiers.
"Check."
"Nobody there."
"Quiet."
"The hounds?"
"No reaction!"
Not one of them perceived that Lee Han was passing at their side. It was as if they took the man called Lee Han for an inanimate object. He wore no cloak of invisibility. No cutting-edge stealth weapon was at work. He had merely lowered his presence and twisted their senses on the way past.
Whine. Whine!
There was still a chance the hounds would catch his scent, but this was precisely when a former assassin's wisdom showed its worth.
...Yip?
???
Herbs and medicines plastered on thick to kill his smell did exactly what they were meant to do.
Thuk!
He could slip past hounds and men. A blind arrow or a spear, flung without aim, was another matter, and one came to threaten him all the same.
Tung....
"An arrow?"
"Huh? Was there a rock there?"
So long as Diamond Body held, no arrow or spear was going to drag a scream out of him.
And so—
Slip.
Lee Han went under the cold river without a moment's hesitation.
Splash....
"What was that?"
"A fish?"
"Don't get too close. The place is full of giant crocodiles and poisonous water snakes."
"Th-there are things like that?"
"We turned them loose on purpose. Can't have some human coming in through the river."
"What kind of lunatic would do that? Holy Law has the water heaving like waves."
"True enough."
"Unless he's a complete idiot..."
......I'm not allowed to hit them on the way past, am I?
The knight who had involuntarily earned the titles of madman and idiot barely kept the Turtle-Breath Great Art from unraveling under his anger, and he kept diving. Deep enough that the voices of the soldiers stoking his temper could no longer reach him.
BOOM!
A tremendous crash rang out. A spear and an axe-head larger than any ordinary battle-axe collided, and for an instant the shockwave seemed to tear the air apart. Speed, accuracy, and destructive force that even a capable fighter called a Senior Knight could not have answered — a skill that held all three in full. And yet, in truth—
"Let's leave the playing around here, Dire Wolf. Get serious, and the infiltration loses its point, doesn't it?"
Playing around. That a clash like this was nothing more than a greeting between the two of them was enough to make the head spin.
However.
"You were the one who flared your spirit first, Black Lion!!"
The problem was that this particular game had never been agreed upon.
"In the North, that's how we say hello!"
"Save the bluster for someone who'll buy it!"
As if anyone but him, even among northerners, would call a thing like this a greeting.
More ignorant than a street thug...!!
Masked intruders who had recognized each other anyway, scuffling — and the masked man with the spear ground his teeth. Small wonder. Because of this ignorant bastard—
"Intruders!!"
"The underground! They're in the underground!!"
The whole point of having sneaked in was evaporating.
......All of it, thirty minutes before a certain knight swam the savage current and slipped in through that narrow black opening.