The Knights' Night Raid (6)
A Mystery, it seemed, really was the symbol of faith in this world. Wave around evidence as shaky as shamanic rites and prophecy, and even the ever-suspicious knight of Galahad swallowed it whole and fell in line.
It was a thing his own sense of the world struggled to accept. The team had sprung up out of nowhere, and by rights he should have balked — and yet less than ten minutes after it formed, he had no choice but to admit the truth.
These guys are stupid good?
He hated to grant it. Still, if this were a group project and those two were his partners, you could not have asked for better manpower. They were so absurdly excellent that the idle thought rose on its own: you would be lucky to meet groupmates this diligent once in a hundred years.
"According to what Lionel has investigated over the past several centuries, the Sacred Vault that holds the sacred relics is without doubt a subspace storehouse, raised by the Great Holy Law of more than tens of thousands of priests."
"You actually managed to learn that."
"Lionel's got a heap of old books from ages past, you see. Our scholars went through hell digging it out."
"So you found it much the same way we did. Then where is the place, and is there a key to get in?"
"We got as far as the location. The key, we never found. Which is fortunate, in its way. Even without a key, we have your Third Eye, Dire Wolf."
"...You know a damned lot."
"Heh heh. A shaman taught me this part, too."
"When I return to the house, I'll have our vigilance toward Lionel raised two grades."
"Well now. How frightening."
He didn't need to do a thing. The two of them were already beating the drums and clashing the gongs, solving every last problem on their own.
Wow. Is this what it feels like to be a newbie toddling along behind high-level players?
Slipping past the furious priests and nuns, finding the way, finding the sacred relics — none of it required Lee Han to lift a hand. Sharp-edged personalities aside, the bastards really were competent. Frighteningly so.
...Now and then they were enough to give a man a stress aneurysm, and those fiery tempers were a problem of their own. Take the personalities away and they would have been monstrous talents, but the personalities watered down every virtue they had. Honestly.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"You had a strange look in your eye just now..."
"Give me a break. They're my eyes. I'll glare with them if I want."
"Hrm."
"......"
...Sharp, too. Maybe it came of carrying a near-mystery art like that so-called Third Eye, but his instincts were keen enough to send a ghost packing.
Can't even curse him in my head.
A frightening bastard.
"You're thinking something strange again. If you've got room for stray thoughts, help with the search."
"Search?"
"You heard just now. The Sacred Vault where the relics lie is a subspace storehouse. It exists within the Grand Temple, and it doesn't. And we have to find it."
"Didn't that guy say he knew?"
"He knows, yes — only the rough vicinity. All we can guess is that it lies somewhere around this hill we're standing on."
"That's a hell of a rough guess..."
The Grand Temple was a natural fortress, carved out of a mountain. Because of that, forest, hill, and cliff existed there alongside the temple buildings themselves. Think of a monastery raised on a mountaintop. The temple proper occupied less than four-tenths of the ground; the rest was habitat for plants and animals. So when Maximus pointed at the hill and called it approximate, the word daunting rose all by itself. As if to ask when, exactly, they were supposed to turn this whole expanse inside out and drop dead doing it.
"We'll be searching a good long while."
"My apologies. I thought that once we found the hill, it would show itself at once. Now that we're here, it's far too wide. Heh heh."
"...Is that meant to be an excuse?"
Maximus and Rak fell to bickering again. He had thought it from the moment they met: they did not look like men who got along. Maximus in particular seemed strangely eager to bare his fighting spirit. Were Lionel and Galahad natural enemies to begin with, cats and dogs?
"Whether you two hate each other isn't my concern. A spot that doesn't belong... hm. I think I found it."
"??"
"...What?"
His flat reply threw them for a moment. How could he already have found an entrance in a garden this vast? But Lee Han only went on.
"There. That tree. I think that's the entrance."
"......?"
They could only tilt their heads, blank, at the certainty in his voice, and Lee Han shrugged.
"Go check, then."
"......"
Before long Rak moved toward the young sapling Lee Han had indicated, light on his feet as a flying squirrel, and in less than a minute—
"...You. How in the hell did you know?"
He had found a real entrance. Rak asked it with a face that said he couldn't believe what he was seeing, and Lee Han asked back.
"Echolocation. You know it?"
"??"
"If you don't, forget it."
Explaining would only wear his mouth out, so Lee Han advised him to let it go. What mattered was simpler.
"Finding it is what matters, doesn't it?"
If the result was excellent, wasn't the process beside the point?
For long ages Galahad had been dead serious about internalizing Mystery until it sat in the body like Fighting Art or swordsmanship, and the art of making a Mystery into technique they named Mystery Art. Possessing the talent to learn even one such art was enough to be called a genius without argument, and in all of Galahad's history, it was said, no one had ever learned two or more. That was how difficult it was.
But in the present age there was a knight who had not only mastered more than seven of those monstrously difficult Mystery Arts, but had created a Mystery Art of his own — the Third Eye. And that knight was—
"Hoh. Your eyes really do turn red."
"Bet that comes in handy at night."
"...Quiet, you scoundrels."
Rak de Duron. Champion of Galahad in this generation.
The Third Eye was a composite art, completed by investing no fewer than five of the seven Mystery Arts he had learned. An eye that read an opponent's strength, the flow and the seams of space, and unraveled even magic. And since the Third Eye itself was a Mystery Art that only Rak had succeeded in learning, powers beyond the ones already named surely waited, still unrevealed. Astonishing as it was that he had gained such strength at all, Rak had gone a step further and properly learned how to use the eye.
A metallic click.
"Ancient Holy Law is mixed in. Fortunately. Undoing something of this degree won't be difficult."
"What's that?"
"An artifact made by the mages and shamans of my house, pooling their strength. A useful tool for dismantling Mysteries."
"...Looks exactly like a thief's kit for picking locks."
"Ahem."
"Ah. Sorry."
"...Keep your mouths shut. Don't scatter my concentration for nothing."
Call them cheaply and they were lockpicks; dress them up and they were rakes, the tools of the art of unlocking. Either way, they moved fast. A parade of fantastic technique, possible only for a craftsman armed with expert knowledge of both magic and Holy Law. A mysterious spectacle that might as well have been called a Dispel Show.
Magic and Holy Law, picked apart like a lock.
Talented, too.
To the eye of a complete layman, though, it was nothing but confusion. It certainly looked impressive. Ask him what, exactly, was being done, and he couldn't have said. One thing was clear all the same: even though he had found the entrance, without Rak, getting through it would have been utterly impossible.
Is this why adventuring parties keep a rogue?
For breaking into a place this particular, that class had to be essential. He was watching the work click along as steadily as a man staring into a fire when—
"Hrm. Ominous."
"...Out of nowhere?"
"Ah. Forgive me, my friend. I've a habit of letting my thoughts walk straight out of my mouth."
"Would you quit it with the friend already. Please."
"Haha. A friend is a friend."
"...For fuck's sake."
Lee Han turned his eyes on Maximus, who had dropped the ill-omened remark out of nowhere. What, exactly, was ominous?
"Mmm. Aren't things coming undone a little too easily?"
"......"
"Ah. You feel it too, and quickly."
"...Having the same thought as you is unpleasant, I'll give you that. But now that I think about it, things going well isn't much of a good sign."
His fingertips prickled. Not the pain of a wound — another kind of ache. Phantom pain, the sort that experience leaves behind.
Has anything in my life ever come easy?
They said to tap even a stone bridge before you crossed it, but that was only a proverb. No one truly tapped as they crossed. Stone bridges did not collapse under you mid-step. Lee Han's life, however, had been exactly that: a life in which the stone bridge gave way beneath his feet without warning. Whatever the task, he had been forced to test the bridge he meant to cross, and even after he crossed it, crisis was always waiting on the far side.
Perhaps that was why. The moment things began to resolve as smoothly as Maximus said, displeasure rolled in to match.
Like hell anything I do is going to end safely.
A firm belief. Certain that this much luck could not possibly be piled on him, Lee Han cinched tight the two swords and three daggers he had looted off the half-fiends, and the buckler that served him as a hand shield. As if the lot of them were a lifeline.
"What a load of bullshit."
Rak, still at his work, shot him a reproachful look, the look of a man telling someone who dealt only in unlucky talk to shut his damn mouth. Lee Han was serious.
"You get ready too. The second we go in, something's going to go wrong. Count on it."
"......"
"I'm telling you, just believe me!"
"Heh heh. Brother, there is always the choice of not going in. Why are you so set on it?"
"...I told you to quit calling me friend, and now you've gone and made it brother?"
Maximus's question came out of nowhere. He asked as if he truly wondered why a man who plainly knew the danger kept trying to walk into it, and though the title brother grated, Lee Han still gave him a proper answer.
"Dodge it now and sooner or later we'll still have to wreck whatever crawls out of it. Avoiding the thing doesn't do a damn bit of good."
"......"
"...Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Heh heh. What a pity you were not born a northerner, Brother! Not running for the comfort of the moment, but choosing to fight! Aye! That's what a warrior ought to do!! A choice more northern than any northerner's...!"
"......"
Why was it that being praised didn't make him glad in the slightest?
Hearing this guy call me northern just feels like I'm being cursed out...
It was an unbearably sour moment, and Lee Han was about to open his mouth again when—
A flood of light roared in.
...Before that rushing brilliance, talk was meaningless.
"Get in. Quickly. I can hold it for five seconds."
"...Use your damn blinker."
Grumbling, Lee Han threw himself forward at once. Without a moment's hesitation.
And then—
"—Lee Han. You said you were gonna re-up, didn't you?"
......Regret found him just as fast.
"......"
"Kid, think it over again. There is nothing good about going career!"
"...Dokgo-hyung?"
"Hyung? You brat. Discharge being right around the corner doesn't mean you get to call somebody hyung in the army."
"I-it's really Dokgo-hyung? Dokgo Gupae?"
"......I told you not to call me by my full name!"
"...Whoa. It really is you."
Lee Han blinked and looked around. No beds — only the yellow vinyl flooring where soldiers had to sleep packed in together, wall lockers rusting and rotting in spots, water cans that had seen use even in the days of the Korean War, and old, worn-out issue gear besides.
And...
This guy had hair back then...
Dokgo Gupae. A name that sounded as if he ought to be unleashing the Dokgo Nine Swords, and yet here was his old superior, a man who could barely boil a pot of ramyeon, let alone swing a blade. Lee Han stared at him and blinked, dumbstruck.
He had prepared for a crisis. He had. And yet—
Don't tell me I have to live as an NCO again?
A shiver ran through him. A knight who was sure he would not flinch before hundreds of monsters — before tens of thousands, even — shook with a chill. Two years as a private, he could endure. A remake of his life as a noncommissioned officer? That, he could not......