EP.50 – A Knight Chews on Defeat (4)
Thinking on it, Lee Han might never have truly faced the race called the Aura User. He knew they held a strength worthy of the name Superhuman. He knew they did impossible things, and that no amount of thrashing would ever let him beat them. What he had not known was why they were called Aura Users at all.
And now.
Wooooong! He thought he understood where the name had come from.
“Once you become an Aura User, using Aura is no difficult thing. Other knights must force their life force out through extreme concentration, but for us it is simply energy we can use as a matter of course. The way those spell-mongers use mana.”
“......”
“Which is to say, boasting of that in front of us means nothing. Not that it isn't impressive. Using Aura when you haven't even crossed the ‘boundary’ is certainly a great thing. I'll praise you. Among the young, you'd be counted on the first finger. Heh heh.”
“...I wouldn't go that far.”
“Hm?”
“There's Galahad's miserable spearman. And that hulking bastard from Lionel who makes your blood boil.”
The two knights he knew to be the most swollen with talent, and the two with whom he had never cleanly settled a match. At the mention, Baltar's face showed a brief weighing of thought.
“...Ah. Those ones. Yes, those ones were there. Talent that might stand even above mine in my younger days. Heheh. Have you met them already?”
He nodded, turning over whether he remembered their faces.
“Met them? We punched and hacked our way through the whole of it.”
“Who won?”
“......”
“Tsk, tsk. Worthless. Can't even beat the likes of them—what have you been doing?”
“I didn't lose. I didn't...”
“Excuses. You are a problem yourself. A body like that, and still you cannot force a proper conclusion.... It is all a lack of effort. Effort.”
“Goddamn it!”
Lee Han snarled, and still he could not make himself charge. The Sword River he had always thought magnificent beyond words looked, today of all days, somehow...
Pathetic. Look at this thing.
It might as well have been a toothpick. Thirty beautiful Sword Orbs prowled around Baltar, dancing in the empty air as if they might take him at any moment. A single one held a mass and a destructive power that surpassed Sword River, and there were thirty of them.
Cold sweat poured off Lee Han like rain. The pressure rolling off the Sword Orbs crushed his body, and his stamina drained in real time. A reckless thought flickered—smash the orbs with Sword River?—but no.
No good. Sword River hits a Sword Orb, and Sword River breaks. Every time.
He was sure of it from the force they shed. Let the two collide, and it would not be only the sword that vanished. His arm would go with it.
Then—!
Tak!
“Hm? Still you will not yield?”
“Why would I surrender.”
“Hoh. Empty bravado? Or do you imagine I will not loose these lumps upon you? Either way, it is arrogance.”
“It's not that, so keep your nose out of it. And don't call them lumps!”
“Call them Sword Orbs, or river-orbs—!”
Whoosh!
Sword held high, Lee Han kicked off as he was. A thrust of the utmost simplicity. The motion could not have been straighter, and yet it confessed how long he had trained the sword: raw as it was, its strength and its edge carried a threat beyond any high sword art.
“Will you look at this one?”
Baltar showed more surprise at the plain thrust than he had at the Sword River.
This brat! He has set Intent into the sword!
He had thought the boy grown, but to put Intent on the very tip! Well. Condensing life force to that degree demanded a monstrous focus and will. Raising one's own Intent at the point of the sword was not, in truth, unreasonable.
Clang!
“Heavy. It is still only Intent at the level of a young sapling, but raise it that way and you will draw nearer to me, little by little. Heh heh.”
“What kind of nonsense is that!”
“...Tch. So you were using it without even knowing.”
The man himself, it seemed, could not yet wield it with any awareness. Well. He was no martial artist who fought by enlightenment and technique, but a beast who fought by instinct and sense. It figured.
Funny one.
Which, if anything, only made him more amusing to watch.
Claaang! Lee Han's sword and Baltar's met again and again. Crackle—! Sparks leapt where Sword River struck Sword River. For the two of them now, though, Sword River was nothing but an aid. They met edges over and over like men sharing a sword dance, hardly conscious of it at all.
...Except that the meeting of those edges was a problem, of a sort.
Crack! A shock fit for lightning striking lightning threw up a violent thunder, and at last a rare, chilling sight: lightning climbing not out of the sky, but out of the earth. They were only fighting with everything they had. The duel looked like the end of the world.
Dragon and tiger, too evenly matched to rank. The old phrase meant a dragon and a tiger could not be set above each other, but what unfolded now was nothing less than the destruction that descends when dragon and tiger truly come to blows.
Just when it seemed the Royal Castle itself might come down—
Whooosh!
“The Royal Castle must not fall. Let us end it here.”
The Sword Orbs moved, and fell on Lee Han. Each was no larger than a bowling ball, but let one touch him and a neat hole would open through whatever it met.
Lee Han—
As if he had been waiting for this very instant, he laid a variation through his Sword River.
Wiiing!
The condensed river-force rippled and reached for a change. This was not mere compression. It was sword-force bearing a realization some knight had seized in the world below.
A blue ring of Sword Ki, as if it held the blue heavens, sheared the Sword Orb in two.
Like an ultra-high-pressure water jet slicing an iron ball.
“Huk—! Huuuk!”
He had done the astonishing thing of cutting a Sword Orb, and still no triumph showed on Lee Han's face. He was only pale, like a man who had died and crawled back, slick with cold sweat and nothing else.
“Th-that took ten years off me...”
“......”
“Y-you old man, you actually meant to kill me!”
“......What was that?”
“You try to kill a person, and then you get curious?!”
“Heh heh. This brat, truly! How much more do you mean to entertain me!! Ahahaha!!”
“???”
Lee Han flinched and drew his foot back. The old man was suddenly watching him with madness bright in his eyes. What was that look? It was like... how to put it....
“Yes. What will you show me next? Surely that is not all you have. Show me more. More!”
“......”
...The face of a professor who had just been flirted with?
No. The face a professor had worn the day before, in the academy's debate hall, watching a student present an outrageously clever paper of his own. He was almost sure of it.
Did that kid end up in graduate school?
Somehow Lee Han felt he had become the student at the lectern, and the feeling was not a good one. He really should have surrendered sooner.
Goooo!
From the instant he drew the Boundless Sword, the Sword Orbs turned more threatening still. They had been threatening before. Now there was organization in the way they moved, as if they had made up their minds to kill him. Would you believe it?
Dizzy as a man standing on a cliff's edge, Lee Han was forced into acrobatics.
Whoosh!
He slipped past by a hair. The armor at his shoulder was only grazed, and it evaporated on the spot. It had been decently thick armor. Gone in a moment.
“!!?”
He could not even spare the breath to curse inside his own head. He had to test the edge of what he could do—dodge, and dodge again, on nothing but instinct!
Shhk!
He swung the Boundless Sword. It was the only thing left to trust.
...Except.
Flinch!
“...!”
“Your mind is going blank, isn't it? As it should. A blade tempered with Intent.... Use a thing like that in the moment, and of course the fatigue crashes in all at once. You endure because you are you. Another man might have lost consciousness after a single use, or died. Heheh.”
“Kgh!?”
Baltar's words never reached his ears. All he could do was dodge blindly and swing. A hair from disaster, his eyes themselves blurring. But for Lee Han—
I'm landing one hit on that old bastard!
He wanted to strike, even once, the old man who still looked at him as if he were laughable. So—
I'm going all the way!
Crunch!
He ground the fatigue down with sheer venom and drove forward. Slash! He cut. Crack! He smashed. Shhk!! He cleaved. Breaking everything that barred his path, Lee Han's edge drew, step by step, closer to Baltar.
Not a single Sword Orb remained to stop him. Even so, Lee Han knew. Orbs or no orbs, there was nothing he could do to Baltar. And so—
Sorry, sword!
He resolved to unleash a new method, one that would startle even a Superhuman. He offered an apology to his umpteenth sword and set Sword Resonance loose.
The iron sword answered as if to say it was fine, and shuddered into a violent hum.
Wooong!
An attempt that might have been the first of its kind. He was already manifesting the Sword Ki called the Boundless Sword, and here he meant to lay another Sword Ki over it. Perhaps it was possible only because sound judgment was no longer possible. A road no one had walked, one he could try only because he had gotten stupid.
There are times when a new possibility blooms.
From the soil of the sword, plum blossoms opened.
One blossom. Two. Four. Eight.
Pat. Paaat.Rustle, rustle, rustle. The blossoms opening in that exponential flare were larger than any plum Lee Han had bloomed the day before, and at the same time—
Shaaaa!
They were endlessly changeable. Even reading their flow was difficult, and as if they had inherited the Boundless Sword's ferocity whole, they carried a vast killing edge. The Plum-Blossom Sword, which he had judged unfinished, whose completion had been anyone's guess, gained by a stroke of chance the function of a sword art within a breath of perfection.
And the changefulness of that completed art—
Slice.
“......”
—produced a change even a Superhuman failed to answer in time. Baltar's sleeve was cut away. At that, Baltar did not stint his praise.
“Good...! To see so splendid a flower in this season, and to take a hit besides! Heh heh. So the arrogance was mine! Ahaha.”
When the Sword God took a sword in hand, there had never been anyone who dared land a blow on the Sword God with a sword. To shear even the cloth of a sleeve—splendid.
“...In return, I will show you something fine as well.”
Baltar settled into a middle stance. A posture for the thrust. If the thrust Lee Han had taken had shown a general's spirit steeped in raw power, the posture Baltar showed now called to mind a man of the Way. And as befit such a sword, the thrust he offered—
—Hup!
—was an uncanny thing, as if he were working sorcery.
Swoong!
...In an instant, a hole opened in the plum blossoms. Nothing strange in that. He had thrust. A hole was only proper. But—
“...What?”
What law put the same hole through petals that wrapped every direction of a full circle? Lee Han doubted his own eyes. He blinked, wondering if it was a hallucination, and reality did not change by a hair.
Swooong—!
...Every plum blossom only went on growing a hole. And Baltar was kind. He explained, in person, how such a thing had come to be.
A single swing. Thirty-six strikes.
“A sword art that delivers thirty-six cuts in one swing. Albert's specialty. ...That gentleman unfolds it not with a sword, but with an awl.”
“......”
“Well. If I set my mind to it, I could loose seventy-two in a breath. Or a hundred and forty-four. Heh heh.”
If dozens of blades fell upon the whole body, one had only to swing faster than they came, and block them, or pierce straight through. Watching Baltar deliver that historic piece of nonsense, Lee Han's blood pressure spiked on the spot.
“Sh-shit. Of all things, the Thirty-Six Swords. Wh-what even...”
Baltar's Sword Ki called up the art of the Zhongnan Sect, mortal enemy of the Mount Hua Sect in the old martial novels. Lee Han felt, to the marrow, what a Mount Hua swordsman must have felt on losing to a Zhongnan swordsman in those stories, and so—
“Kgh...!?”
He lost consciousness. Not from fatigue. His blood pressure climbed until it put him out, and he—
Lost again. Goddamn it...
—had to chew on his umpteenth defeat.