The Most Dangerous Creature in the World... (3)
Fwoosh! The blades could not be seen. The light their edges drew was wind itself, and in that wind lay a force fit to shake the earth. Those the world called knights, it was said, moved swift as the wind and struck with the ferocity of lightning. True to the saying, their bodies were wind—and among winds, a gale. A human body, that pitifully frail thing of hide, might be made into a lump of meat, and there would be nothing strange about it.
And yet.
Thud!
"!!"
However savage the gale, however the lightning shook the ground, a mountain that stood steadfast could not be broken.
Screech! The blades threw sparks and tried to split his hide, but that hide was thick iron and would not suffer so much as a scratch.
"Ghhh—!"
"You—you damned monster...!!"
Five Half-Fiends, each the match of a knight—no exaggeration to call them high knights—strained until the veins stood out at their temples and snarled. They had lost their composure. A fatal mistake, though in a moment like this, keeping one's head was close to impossible.
And no wonder.
"You should have built more strength."
Lee Han did not even use a shield. He simply took the Half-Fiends' blows as they came, and five blades failed to bite his skin in the slightest.
Diamond Body. By now it was a technique as much his own signature as anything, one he unfolded as naturally as drawing a breath. Where once it had held the steadfastness of rock, Diamond Body now possessed the steadfastness of a mass of iron. No ordinary edge could so much as scratch him.
If someone wanted even a nick—
"Even short of Sword Qi, shouldn't you at least be using Sword Resonance?"
Well. Even if they could manage Sword Qi or Sword Resonance.
Crunch! He had no intention of simply standing there and taking it then, either.
Lee Han moved his arms and swung with everything he had from above and below at once. It was only an arm in motion, and yet the limb carried a might that brought a hammer to mind. The blades leveled at his body crumpled, every last one of them, like tin cans.
That alone would have been terror enough, from the other side.
Whoosh! In the next instant the arm gripping the buckler punched straight through the front like a spear thrust. Not the simple principle of extending a fist—a driving blow that seemed to loose the strength of his whole body. A tremendous fist-wind burst outward in every direction, and the things clinging to Lee Han like cicadas and moths were flung clear.
Boom! As if a charging bull had taken them head-on, every Half-Fiend went flying into the empty air. They could not withstand the fierce force of a blow carrying the momentum of the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist. The one who took the buckler square from the front, in particular—
Splatter! His head vanished where it was, and a fountain of blood sprayed. The others were each missing something. An arm, or a leg.
Thump.
"Hoo!"
Lee Han drew a light breath and settled his wind, as if cooling the heat the fight had stoked. And watching him—
"Knight. You're really strong."
The Gatekeeper, in the shape of a tiny round bird, let out a sigh of pure admiration.
"Thanks."
"But you fight awfully mean. That isn't a knight's way. That's how an ogre fights. Or a troll."
"...Praise or an insult. Pick one and commit to it."
"Huh? That was praise too."
"Which part of it...?"
Even as he listened to the Gatekeeper's praise, which did not sound like praise in the least, Lee Han swept a look around him. Of the fifty Half-Fiends that had rushed him, most were dead, or had fainted under grievous wounds, or were wandering the border of death. Leave them, and some would simply bleed out where they lay.
In truth—
"Wiped out."
An overwhelming victory. Alone, he had annihilated fifty Half-Fiends of high-knight caliber. A tremendous feat. Had word of it gotten out, it would have become a lay of martial merit and drawn gasps from many. Well. Lee Han already had a record of victory against a hundred knights, so he felt no particular sense of achievement. Above all, set beside the Scarlet Eagle, these things were endlessly weak and base. Beating the likes of them brought not a scrap of accomplishment. It only felt as if he had exterminated moths.
...More than that.
"How long are you lot going to stand there and watch?"
Lee Han poured his momentum over the four men and women who were still, gratingly, spectating his fight.
Whoosh—!
"Mmm..."
A Lion's Roar surpassing even the bellow of the Mountain Lord struck the four, low and heavy, and each of them gave a step.
"...Scary. For real."
Whether the words were a complaint or not, cold sweat kept pouring off them, and Lee Han settled into a readiness to loose himself like an arrow at any moment. Preparation, first of all, to kill at least one of them without fail.
But for an instant—
A twitch.
Lee Han's eyes caught it. The woman's fingers, writhing in the stillness like an earthworm. And the next moment—
Boom!
Exactly where Lee Han had been standing, sparks flashed and exploded. Like dynamite going off. The force was so great that Half-Fiends sprawled nearby burst apart—a power to which two birds with one stone was the only fitting phrase.
Fortunately—
"Hot..."
Lee Han had already moved far off before the blast, and he came through unharmed. His clothes were a little scorched.
"Number Eight. You heard a lot from that kid, didn't you? You even know my ability. Hmm. Though knowing it isn't the same as being able to dodge it.... You're impressive enough to get tiresome."
Seeing that he had avoided the explosion, Dina, the Seventh Apostle, admired him, as if it had been a long while since she had seen anyone dodge this.
"Like hell. I dodge because if I don't, I die."
The compliment did not please Lee Han in the slightest. However immune he might be to blades, that did not mean he could endure the heat of an explosion.
I could take about thirty of them. There's still nothing good about getting hit.
Stack the damage, and that became a serious blow in its own right.
A lava lizard. A lizard that swam through magma and fed on flame. By another name—
They called it a Salamander.
It was hardly a fresh revelation, but the Black Moon, to which Lee Han had once belonged, had unquestionably been a den of mad scientists. They had gathered children under the age of ten and repeated the insane experiment of implanting monster factors into them thousands upon tens of thousands of times. By common sense, put a spider's essence into a human, and did that human truly gain a spider's abilities? No. Of course not. Far more likely there would be no reaction at all—or side effects, if anything. These bastards, side effects or no, had kept forcing monster factors into children without end, and at last they had wrung results from it. They had simply tried until it worked, and by chance successful specimens had come into being. Barely one in a thousand succeeded, and even the children who succeeded often died not long after. They had lived through odds of one in several thousand, and those among them worthy of being called successes were named the Numbers.
Number Seven. The woman now called the Seventh Apostle had been one of them.
So she's gotten skilled at using the Salamander's power.
The Salamander, also called the lava lizard, was one of the rare monsters found only in regions of lava. Some scholars said the lava lizard was closer to a spirit-beast than a monster, but the danger it carried had led the continent to classify it as a monster all the same.
Boom!
True to lizards that lived by eating lava, they possessed a peculiar constitution. A body that burned, in the moment, at temperatures from the hundreds of degrees into the thousands was honestly the cute part. Leave it alone, and that was the end of it.
But—
Boom!!
The ash it shed from its body, carrying an explosive force on the level of dynamite, was not cute in the slightest. That was the dangerous thing about the lava lizard. It mixed invisible nitroglycerin into the wind, let it drift, and detonated it as it was. A living hazard. A living bomb. Some kingdom had tried to capture the creatures, meaning to use them as weapons, only for the lava lizards to run wild, blow the palace away, and burn the king and his high nobles to death. So there it was.
That says it all.
The danger was truly of the highest class. And a human—a trained assassin, at that—was wielding the power of such a lava lizard.
Truly.
Boom!
Booooom!
Booooom—!!
She could be nothing other than a living weapon of gunpowder.
Lee Han moved at high speed and threw his body clear. He could not gauge when or from where an ember would come, so simply moving with all the swiftness he had was best, and his face grew steadily harder.
"What is this...? Why are you trickier and more dangerous than that Number Four bastard?"
As he remembered it, her explosions had once been firecracker-level, and she had not handled the ability this freely. Why had someone who used to lose even to a man with ogre sinews become a threat like this?
Kindly enough, she answered him.
"The Fourth Apostle? Hmm. While that one was buried in the Tunnels for years, I wasn't exactly sitting idle either. And playing with numbers doesn't mean all that much, does it? In the old days we took our names by rank, but—that information is badly out of date."
She answered kindly, and showed the ability again.
Fwoosh! Every time the woman flicked a finger, explosives detonated in empty air, and at last—
Fire roared up!
Flame shot skyward and wrapped around Lee Han. Once again, an ability he was seeing for the first time.
Fire closed around him. Touch it, and even he would burn.
"Flame Net. Touch it, and even you will find it very hot."
"......"
"Ah. I suppose something like this isn't enough to stop you after all...?"
The woman shrank in on herself. She had covered him with the Flame Net, but the moment Lee Han drew a dagger and set himself to kick, a sharp chill fell over her. Even if she loosed an explosion, instinct told her that her own head would be pierced at the same time. Feeling the chill of death, she had to stop playing with her fingers.
So instead—
"All right. You stop playing too, and help me."
She called the other comrades. Because she did not want to die.
At that request—
"...We don't want to die either."
"I told you not to poke an angry beast."
"Dina, keep that up and you'll die."
"...Want us to hold a funeral rite and just tell you to die?"
They had no wish to die taking the brunt of that knight's anger, so they had answered the call for help with coldness. But that was only talk. They too gradually drew sickles, whips, and a shield, and just when it seemed their odds of survival had risen a little—
"You slow bastards. Took you long enough to get up."
"!!?"
The instant his words ended, she saw a spear aimed at her head.
BOOOOM!!
Whoooosh! It was a world inside a watercolor, where there should not even have been a wind of dust, and yet a thick air like a dust-storm spread through that world. The spear of the knight who held crimson eyes, and—
Crunch!
"Grrrgh!"
"...You blocked my spear?"
—the astonishing defense of the man with the shield, Dent, the Fifth Apostle, met it, and the shockwave they made was the result. Of course—
Crack!
Dent's arm, having blocked the spear, had not come through unharmed. Merely blocking it was already more than he could bear.
And Rak de Duron was not one to let that pass. He thrust the spear again, bearing a momentum fiercer still than the moment before—!
"...Huh? That isn't going to work."
Lee Han's mutter came late, and Rak, not even knowing what it meant, had already swung the spear.
And so.
Flash!
What flew in the next instant was Rak's body.
Thwack!
"You all right, Dire Wolf? A curious thing. To think you'd go flying so emptily. Haha!"
"...Don't laugh."
He was surely saying it out of real concern, but Maximus had a gift for a manner of speaking that set a person's blood boiling, and his worry only made Rak furious. And as if fanning a house already on fire—
"Idiot. Look at that woman and you still can't tell? Every one of them is carrying something halfway to a Mystery. She's a lava lizard, and that one is basically an Impact Dial."
"...What's that?"
"Uh... a thing that soaks up the impact and throws it back at twice the force?"
"......"
"The thing is honestly cheating."
"...Say that sort of thing a little sooner."
"Yeah? And who told you to be asleep?"
"......"
For the first time, in a situation where he could offer no rebuttal, Rak had to fall silent. A realistic demonstration that the cliché of arriving late and becoming the hero was, after all, something that only worked on the stage.