The Knights' Night Raid (4)
If Lee Han had decided on one thing for this operation, it was this: he would not hurt anyone.
It wasn't that violence had suddenly gone stale on him. Steal what you came to steal, and you were a thief; start swinging your fists on top of it, and there was no talking your way out of being a criminal. That was the whole of the resolve. Unfortunately...
Whud!
...as the old folks never tired of saying, the world seldom arranged itself to suit a man's intentions.
Crack!
Lee Han threw the punch without a moment's hesitation. It was a blow fierce enough to punch through rock, and it did exactly that to the guard in front of it, shattering the jaw beneath. The man would be living on porridge from now on, but Lee Han had no time to feel sorry for him. Two holy knights were already closing from either side, and he caught both swords in his bare hands.
Crunch!
"!!?"
The Holy Knights could not hide their shock that a man had seized their blades barehanded. Shocked or not, he crushed the swords as if they were kindling, and the broken edges—
Thuk!
"Ghhk—!?"
"Keep it down. You'll make a scene."
—punched clean through the napes of their necks.
Rrk!
They coughed blood and tried to scream. Lee Han robbed them even of that last death-cry, ripping their tongues out before the sound could leave them. A wretched way to die, if ever there was one. He did not waste on them the mercy of anything like pity. He only looked at them, cold.
Had they been ordinary holy knights, his hands might not have been quite so merciless. To his thoroughly foul displeasure, they were nothing of the sort.
If anything—
"Why the hell are these things here?"
They were vermin that deserved to die, and nothing more. Lee Han's brow knotted without mercy.
No. Why, in the temple of all places...
A Half-Fiend, wearing a holy knight's skin?
To speak only of the result, Lee Han succeeded in breaking through the maze that was the Grand Temple.
He worked out that the place he had landed was an underground shelter—his own guess, at any rate—and all around it he found the temple's wealth asleep in a blaze of gold. Chairs and candlesticks wrought of gold, golden crowns, heaps of bullion...
...So the temple was filthy rich.
He spared a moment to be impressed, all over again, by the fortune the temple had been hiding. He did not so much as reach for the gold. Gold was not what he was after. When a man had a goal, he was meant to look at that goal and nothing else, and Lee Han was not a man who lost to greed.
How long he walked after that, he couldn't have said. Little by little, the signs of people drew near.
"Nobody in here?"
"Rats. Filthy rats!"
"Do they even know where they dare to intrude?!"
"Those men must be burned. Every last one of them!"
...Priests, by the sound of them, and furious. He hadn't planned on eavesdropping, but hidden in the dark with their talk pouring over him, Lee Han gave a small flinch. He was usually shameless about whatever he did. This once, he had to admit, it stung.
...So I'm not the only one who broke in?
The news that he might have company made him tilt his head. The priests offered nothing more about the intruders. He decided there was no further information to be had and meant to let it go, when—
??
Something about certain priests among them felt wrong. Wrong in a way he could not simply walk past.
"Senior, may I skip tonight's prayer gathering? I'm not feeling well..."
"Do so. Forcing yourself to attend won't please the Radiant One."
"Thank you, Senior."
A young priest, with a face that looked somehow green and unformed. Innocent, the sort of face that would have warmed anyone else who looked at it. What Lee Han felt was only one thing.
...What is that disgusting thing?
He went after the man at once. The other priests scattered to prepare the prayer gathering, and it did not take long for the young priest to be left alone. Sure enough, once he was—
"Tsk. Kneeling all day at my age is going to be the death of me."
Words that did not belong to the face wearing them. Lee Han moved at once.
Flash!
"Kghak!?"
He came down on the young priest the way a hawk takes prey, too fast to follow. Then he spoke—not to a young priest, but to the middle-aged man who had only been wearing one.
"Why's a half-fiend bastard doing here?"
"!!?"
"Right. You're not going to answer just because I asked. Fair enough. So let's have a ten-minute interview, you and me. For the record, I don't need you to answer."
"!!?!!"
Force driven into muscle and bone, imitating separation without the mercy of a quick death.
Crrrack. It was already the third beast this year he had caught wearing a mask of human skin, and Lee Han began the Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation then and there. Ten minutes proved unnecessary. Inside of five, the man was obediently answering every question put to him. Even so...
"You answered nicely, so I'll throw in thirty more minutes. On the house."
Lee Han offered the extra service in the spirit of gratitude. The man must have been overjoyed. His body flopped and slapped against the floor, and tears of blood even spilled from his eyes. A truly heartwarming sight.
"If I'd had the time, I'd have added half a day."
Lee Han snorted, picturing the man who by now would be half a cripple. He always thought it, but doing a good deed put him in a fine mood.
"You know this warm feeling? Ah, guess not. A pack of bastards who've never done a day of volunteer work in your lives."
"......"
"Ah. Sorry. I pulled your tongues out."
"......"
"Don't cry, you little shit. What did you do so well that you're crying?"
It only made him want to hit them again.
In this world there was a breed called the Demon Person.
Just as an animal or a plant that ate the leavings of monsters would itself turn monstrous, a human became a demon person by eating monster flesh. Those who did lost their humanity without exception, and even turned to eating their own kind. Among the famous cases was a woman who happened to ingest monster flesh, then killed and devoured her own child. That alone was enough to sketch what a demon person was: people who were human, and then were not, and who gained a strength not inferior to a knight's, which made them miserable to face. In a sense, a natural enemy of humankind, harder to fight than the monsters themselves.
And Lee Han remembered that the fanatic trash of The Tunnels had used exactly that nature to produce a result. A result that was a demon person, and yet not.
Their research is making the rounds.
That result had been a breed called the half-fiend. They did not lose all of their humanity, as a demon person did. What they gained instead was a ridiculous speed of growth, and power to match. He had first seen them in the Tunnels. He had not expected to meet them again like this.
Lee Han looked over the eighteen half-fiends strewn at his feet and could only find it absurd. Half-fiends, disguised as holy knights, swaggering through the temple as if they belonged there. If word of this got out, the whole kingdom would be turned on its head. No—an uproar would be the lucky outcome. Let this go wrong, and...
This could bring the temple down.
The temple, collapsed. It sounded like nonsense at a glance, and still the thought that it might actually come true left him dizzy. He had no small grudge against the temple, but he could not deny the good it held either. Holy Power was why the common people could be treated when they were sick, and why the poor and the orphans had somewhere to go for relief. If the temple staggered and then fell, the chaos would match a natural disaster, and it would run the length of the kingdom.
Goddamn it. I came in here with a light heart. How did it turn into this?
He had slipped into the temple to flip the board, not to walk out holding proof that could topple the Grand Temple. Better if he at least knew who had called these things in. Find the source, lean on that one bastard, and be done. But—
These ones don't know anything.
He had squeezed them for all they were worth. The half-fiends had simply been ordered here. They knew nothing. They had never even been told what they were supposed to do. No one had given them orders face to face; letters and scraps of paper had been the whole of it. Since arriving at the temple, they had not met a single high priest. A mess from top to bottom.
...What is he even trying to do?
By now he was genuinely lost. That fanatic—no, the schemer who had laid this whole board—what did he want? To bring the kingdom down? To take the temple for himself? The more Lee Han dug, the more it felt like sinking into a deep swamp, and the feeling was foul.
"This is disgusting..."
At last the rising disgust dragged a killing intent out of him. He had been damping his presence with all the care he had, precisely so he would not be found, and it might as well have been for nothing. This once, he could not hide how foul he felt.
And then—
Whoosh!
"!"
As if to prove that showing himself had been a fatal mistake, he sensed something coming to take him. On instinct he snatched up a sword from the half-fiends sprawled on the floor and swung.
BOOM!
The sword he had swung met a spear, and a huge shock rang out from the clash. It did not sound like sword on spear. It sounded like two shot puts had been hurled into each other.
Insane!
One collision was enough. This one was a monster of skill. The problem was—
Whssh!
Crack!
—that there was not one of them, but two. Lee Han had no room to dodge. A masked man with a truly enormous frame drove a body check into him, and he was flung away.
I got launched?
He had bled the impact off, every bit of it, and still his body had left the ground because he could not withstand the charge. He could not remember the last time that had happened. It felt less like a bull hitting him than an elephant, one beast in full charge shoving him aside. He caught his balance by a hair and fixed the two new enemies with a glare.
Their presence alone told him. They were dangerous. Dangerous enough to put his life at risk.
Which meant—
I go all out too.
KUUUNG!
Lee Han stamped his foot down hard enough to shake the floor. Two opponents worth betting his life on. He could no longer afford to measure his strength. Found or not, he would fight like a man with nothing left to lose...!
"Hm? You wouldn't happen to be Rihan, would you?"
"......?"
"A presence as baleful as a beast's, and a body like a lump of iron. No mistake! Haha! To think I'd see you in a place like this. The world is a small place!"
"......"
What was this voice? He knew it.
"And why the hell are you here?"
Another voice he knew.
"You little shit... you're the spearman?"
"......"
The man answered by pulling off his black mask instead. What showed beneath it was a spearman with crimson eyes alight: Rak de Duron. As if to match him, the masked man with the enormous frame showed his face as well.
"Heh heh. It's been a while, Rihan!"
"...I told you. It's Lee Han, not Rihan."
"Haha, I know. As if I'd forget the name of the man who beat me."
"......The hell you do."
A frame so huge you could have believed him a giant, and black hair he wore like a boast. The North's Champion, the man they called the Black Lion.
"Maximus."
"Call me Max. Everyone close to me does."
Maximus Iron de Lionel.
Lee Han stared at the two knights—ill fate or fate, he couldn't have said which—and his face went blank with disbelief.
What?
No—
"Why are you two crawling out of here?"
"That's my line."
"Haha! Feels like a class reunion. Delightful!"
...That man always did know how to say something awful.
Class reunions can rot.
These were classmates Lee Han wanted, with complete sincerity, to cut out of his life.