A Lady's Heart Is Fickle as a Reed (4)
Sword-riding, is it.
Lee Han fixed the branch drifting in empty air with a look that meant business. It was nothing but a twig, and still he refused it so much as a scrap of carelessness.
"You take this rather seriously. It is nothing more than a branch."
"...From where I'm standing, that isn't just a branch. If anything, it looks like a more annoying attack than a sword."
"You grasped that by instinct? Remarkable."
"Not instinct. Just..."
Thwack!
He was only on his guard because he had not read his martial arts novels for nothing.
Lee Han kicked off and swung the iron sword still seated in its scabbard. It was only a test, the blade left undrawn, and the moment scabbard met branch—
Boom!
"...Show this to a physicist and he'd clutch the back of his neck."
The impact rang out heavy as hammer on hammer. No one could have called that weight a dead twig, and he had not the faintest idea how such a thing was possible, but he reminded himself that the breed called superhumans did not live inside common sense, and a bitter smile touched his mouth.
So be it.
I'll just tell myself I've got more sparring partners.
He decided to leave it at that. He would treat the branches rushing him as swordsmen, as partners in a bout, and he reset his stance into something meant for evasion.
Why evasion, and not attack or defense?
Because of course he had to evade.
Swoosh! Swoosh!
His opponent was not one. There were seven of them...!
Seven branches swam through the air, and all seven came at him at once. On any other day he would have stopped them with Diamond Body, but he remembered Felicia telling him not to use a single technique, and so he would have to spend a little more sweat.
Whoosh.
Anyone who had watched him block edged steel with nothing but his body, stupid and direct, might have taken him for a man poor in technique. They would have been wrong. Lee Han had never once been careless with fundamentals, with swordsmanship, or with footwork, any more than with the rest of his training.
Did they think he could use something as tangled as the Phantom Eight Trigrams Step for no reason at all?
Fwoosh!
He moved quick and supple, nothing like a man of his bulk. There was no flash in it. The footwork was plain to the point of austerity, and yet it did not so much walk the ground as glide over ice, smooth and swift. And when footwork of that kind found its harmony with the sword—
Crack!
"Good!"
—putting down a swordsman (a branch) was no difficult matter.
At last his sword smashed one of them to pieces, and Felicia clapped as if the sight delighted her all over again.
"I'm not a clown, for the record."
He let his displeasure show, feeling uncomfortably like a performer, but Felicia did not even seem to hear him. She simply kept sending the branches.
"Now then. Let us raise the intensity a little."
Flash!
As if someone had suddenly cranked the difficulty of an exam, the speed and pressure pouring off the branches changed.
Smack!
"God damn it..."
He barely turned the branch aside, but the shock that ran through his wrist was of a different order entirely, and the curse tore out of him on reflex.
This isn't ordinary sword-riding.
Even among the realms of the flying sword, there was a pinnacle called the Heart-Driven Sword. He had a feeling it might look something like this.
Or she may already have gone a step past even that.
He made up his mind not to define her sword-riding—no, her Empty-Air Sword—by the knowledge and common sense he happened to possess. Fix this art inside his own frame, and he was certain he would never beat it.
Shing!
He flung the scabbard aside and drew the blade at last. Seriously. So that he could show her whatever sincerity he had in him.
And sure enough—
BOOM!!
The branches, already heavy, poured out a pressure greater still, as if to tell him that drawing fast, with no bravado in it, had been the correct answer.
"Hup!"
Crack-crackle!
Lee Han drew a breath and gave the branch that wanted a contest of strength exactly the contest it wanted, and the branch came apart at once. The one stealing in at his back met the same end.
Thwack!
Slice!
He looked, at a glance, as if he were swinging with perfect monotony, but the strength riding the blade was monstrous. The wind and the keen edge born of a single cut called sword-wind to mind. It was a horizontal slash he had honed for three years while holding a barbell of several hundred kilograms. In a sense, that ferocity was only natural.
"...Magnificent. The strength is one thing, but I can see you have not skipped a single day of training. Did you climb this far on basic swordsmanship alone?"
"Never had a master who could teach me a sword art worth using."
"That makes it all the more magnificent, and all the more admirable. Because you had no master, you beat yourself all the harder...! You are no different from an ingot cast in the shape of a man. Tempered so thoroughly that one cannot even guess how many times you have been refined."
Felicia did not stint on praise. It was praise so excessive it almost sounded like mockery, and yet she had reason enough to pile the compliments so high.
"Child. You were not particularly gifted, were you?"
Swoosh!!
"The body is extraordinary, yes, but that body must be a work made through training impossible for an ordinary human. Mystery... I think not. You were likely subjected to experiments that improved your recovery. You must have suffered a great deal from childhood."
BOOM!
"Ah, of course I do not say that is a bad thing. In my younger days there were others with recovery like yours. They tempered their bodies in a manner much like yours now. For reference, among those with such recovery there was one who possessed a tremendous Mystery called Regeneration, and his talent for the sword was fine as well.... In the end he grew drunk on his own strength, turned arrogant, and later he was the first to die."
Crunch!
"The others who possessed recovery never surpassed their own limits either, in the end. They lacked tenacity. They lacked resolve."
Slice!
Lee Han had no attention to spare for her words. The branches had taken on a cutting power as if edges had been set into them, and they had begun to shear through his collar. Their weight was as heavy as weight could be, and they drove him, and drove him again.
That did not mean they could push him into a crisis.
"Starting to piss me off."
Creak!
His muscles writhed, alive with motion. Like a spring or a band of rubber straining to return to its nature, they swelled taut and made ready to let their force go. He was not using Gyeong. His strength, by itself, was already explosive, and the instant that compressed power burst out through the medium of a sword, it was nothing short of—
BOOOOOOM—!
—a shell falling out of the sky.
Crack-crack...!!
A roar like an explosion that shook the axis of the earth rolled over the building and split the ground at last. Dust blew up and covered the garden like fog, then tore away just as quickly and laid Lee Han and the branches bare.
"...Scariest branches I've ever had to deal with."
All seven of them lay in pieces, tumbled across the earth, and still Lee Han felt nothing like relief.
Tick....
"Since when does an iron sword just snap..."
His own blade was one step from shattering with them. He looked at the cracks webbing the steel and smiled without humor.
"I-Instructor must not call Kunta a mystery-race from now on. When Kunta looks, Instructor is stranger."
"I agree. Very much so..."
"Haha..."
Kunta and Arno could only stare, dumbfounded, at a master who had broken the ground without using Fighting Art or Gyeong. Set beside him, even a barbarian famed for strength would have been nothing but a frail man. Only Levi, her face awkward, ventured a small and timid objection.
"Isn't it... rather cool?"
It was not a remark destined to find a second. No one agreed.
"...Elsa, I hate to say this, but is he really Sir Turtle?"
"...Who can say?"
While everyone who had just witnessed the magic called Lee Han's muscular strength wore the same vacant look, his own eyes were aimed at Felicia alone, straight and unwavering.
"Splendid. One can see, in this, just how tenaciously you have tempered your body. You are greater than that arrogant man of the past, and it is true that you are finer than those who had talent."
"Being compared to someone, or praised for being better than them, isn't really my interest."
Ching.
He leveled at her a sword that would not have been strange if it broke that very instant.
"You coming yourself now? Or are you going to try that Empty-Air Sword again?"
"I would like to, but I do not think I should. Do it again, and this time I might kill you."
"...You sure know how to make a sentence sound lethal."
He understood that this was not confidence. It was simple fact. If she brought the Empty-Air Sword out again, he would get serious and play every card he had, and even then he could not make himself believe he would beat an Aura User.
Rush her, and the one who would pay for it was him.
I'd turn into a human cactus.
The thought of those branches punching neat little holes all through his body was already trying to drop his temperature. Imagination alone was enough to chill him.
"Hm. I believe I roughly understand what your problem is."
"...?"
"Heh. You were so earnest about the bout that you seem to have forgotten. We were not fighting, were we? I only meant to learn about you through a light spar."
"......It did not feel light. At all..."
Tap.
He had barely gotten the retort out—where, exactly, had that been light?—before she struck the earth with the branch in her hand, as if to say he would attend to her words.
"??"
Lee Han tilted his head. It was not that he had failed to understand the words. There was a part of them he simply could not accept.
...How do you even use mental power?
The question on his face was whether mental power was a thing one could use at all. She smiled, bright and easy.
"You wish to know how one uses the energy called mental power? Well..."
It feels like this.
Felicia held out her palm, lightly. It was a motion that made a man wonder what she thought she was doing, and Lee Han had just begun to tilt his head again when—
Rumble...!
"......"
The ornamental boulder set in the center of the garden began to tear itself out of the earth. A rock that had stood some twenty meters off. And with no warning whatsoever, in an instant...!
"It looks like Mystery, does it not? But it is not Mystery. It is simply that the mental energy I possess pulled that rock free."
"...That is straight-up telekinesis."
"I told you it is not Mystery. It is merely.... Yes. Anyone can do it, so long as they have fighting spirit and faith!"
"......"
"...Why do you look at me like that?"
"No reason. Just..."
...Because if fighting spirit and faith alone could do that, he rather thought he could split the sea in half as well.
What is this, the miracle of the Red Sea...?
It was the moment he became convinced that an Aura User would make an excellent religious leader.