A Lady's Heart Is as Fickle as a Reed (5)
Had she been born into the martial world, she might well have walked straight into the Bodhi Sect—the Sword Marquis... no. The Sword Duke of House Offen unspooled her explanation in finer detail.
"Have you ever seen a sight like this? A woman who has never once held a sword in her life, calling up superhuman strength to save a child in peril. Or a fugitive tearing away at tremendous speed to escape a wolf, a tiger, or a bear met without warning on a mountain path. Those make excellent examples as well."
Tap, tap.
She rapped her own head with a fingertip.
"Such things are possible because, when a human is driven to the very brink of death, they can drag out potential they never knew they had. And what lets that potential come forth is none other than—"
Tap.
She went on, still clutching the twig. She seemed to have grown fonder of it than expected.
Her gaze slid aside.
"Hm? Have you a question, dear child?"
"Th-that's..."
Levi, who had somehow ended up seated in the garden with the others, listening to Felicia, raised her hand first as a model student ought to, and asked.
"If—if I have Your Grace the Sword Duke right, is this power called willpower something anyone can use? Hearing it, it sounds as though even an ordinary person who never learned the sword could wield it. I thought the willpower you used was the sort of power one could barely reach only through endless training, like my master."
"A most admirable question!"
Delighted as a university professor who has finally been asked something worth answering, Felicia turned a gaze brimming with affection on Levi and ruffled her hair without mercy. Levi was flustered and could not bring herself to dodge the Sword Duke's hand, managing only an awkward smile—but Felicia, naturally not the sort to notice such things, simply said what she meant to say.
"Yes. As you say, dear child, willpower may seem a power anyone can use. Think of it the other way, however, and willpower is a blade without a hilt. Anyone may come to wield it, by chance or by necessity alike, but misuse that power and the price is enormous."
"The price...?"
"Set the people from those examples into it. The mother who saved her child found every tendon in her body snapped the next day, and the one who fled a beast at full strength tore his muscles apart. In the end, both had to convalesce for more than a year before their bodies recovered."
"......"
"For the record, I saw it myself."
"Ah...!"
Told they were real events, one could hardly fail to believe her.
"So willpower looks like a power anyone might use, yet let just anyone use it and disaster follows. That is why training matters, and why it becomes so very important to wield this willpower according to one's own will."
"Kunta can ask question too?"
"Ask as much as you like."
"When Kunta heard explanation, that willpower thing—Kunta feel it is just using all the strength the body has. But if one uses the body's strength all the way, can one move things with the mind like a spell-person? Kunta not really understand."
"Ho. For all his size, the child pricks a surprisingly keen spot."
"...That praise?"
"But of course."
Felicia nodded, granting that Kunta's words were not wrong either.
"...To answer your doubt: first, moving one's own body as one wills, and placing it under willpower's rule, is the foundation of willpower."
"?"
"Heh. Put more simply, how freely you can move this hidden potential by your own will decides your skill with willpower—and at a certain moment, that power begins to reach the world outside you as well. 'The path on which my heart itself becomes the sword.' Baltar's words."
"???"
"That is the face of one who does not understand."
"...Seems Kunta still find the common tongue hard."
"Don't worry, Sir Kunta. I don't understand it either."
"Nor do I, Kunta."
The sword-faculty classmates, unexpectedly companions in confusion, patted one another's shoulders over their shared ignorance.
...He understood.
Unlike his quick-witted disciples and everyone else present, none of whom had followed Felicia at all, only Lee Han—flat on the lawn from exhaustion—truly grasped what she meant by willpower. It was not that his mind was especially keen.
Intent Wounds the Person.
He had already met something similar in books, and so he understood faster than the rest.
Intent Wounds the Person. A lofty martial realm in which thought alone can injure a person. Recast in Felicia's version, however, Intent Wounds the Person in this world might amount to the realm in which a knight freely commands fighting energy—the force called life-force, or the pulse of life.
Fighting Art, in the end, turns the life-force inside the body into energy and forcibly raises what the body can do. Reach this willpower she's talking about, and that power stops being forced. You use it naturally.
Until now it had been wringing water—life-force—out of the soil of the body. To handle willpower would be to draw that water from a river instead: more natural, and far easier to call upon.
Sounds like nothing. It's enormous.
In a sense, it was a realm that could overcome every weakness of knights other than Lee Han himself—the danger of internal injury, and the inability to last a long fight. There would be no need to run Fighting Art at all. Simply making life-force easier to summon would put an end to wasted strength. If that held, then in theory—
Could I seize things out of empty air, too?
Not only the rock from a moment ago. Perhaps even a person. And yet—
What that nine-tailed-fox auntie showed wasn't empty-air seizure.
It was a realm wholly apart from merely handling objects with telekinesis. He had not felt so much as a trace of life-force being used. It had been the level of the Mind Sword—lifting a blade by the heart alone.
...Only a guess. Probably.
"Willpower. Does that have realms, too?"
"Hm? ...Ah. You have already noticed that far? What a curious child. Looking at your face alone, one would never think you thought at all..."
"Don't judge people by their faces. Just answer."
"I-I am sorry. That is not what I meant to say... Mm. To answer your question, babe, saying that willpower has realms seems the wrong expression. If I must put it one way, willpower is like swordsmanship. The more one trains, the more refined the art becomes—but the deeper one digs, the less one can see the end."
"So that's the idea."
"Just so."
"Then the level of willpower I handle now is..."
"...Mm. Even being generous, is it not about a baby short of his hundredth day, waving a toy sword about?"
"......"
No wonder. She called the others children, yet insisted on babe for him alone. In her eyes, his command of willpower really was no better than a squalling infant at his first birthday.
Lee Han put on the look of a man finally convinced, and yet—
Goddamn it. That old man really was toying with me.
Remembering Baltar, who had roared with laughter all through their duel, Lee Han felt a hot wash of shame. He understood all too clearly how the swords he swung must have looked from that man's side.
I was doing baby tricks?
At thirty, he realized he had unwittingly performed cute little antics for Baltar.
Wait. Now that I think about it... don't I already know what Intent is?
The shame of having shown off in front of Baltar lasted only a moment. The instant Lee Han understood that Intent was the realm of Intent Wounds the Person, he suspected he might already be using a fragment of that power.
The Arhat Divine Fist. The Boundless Sword. Putting will into a fist, or forging a blade out of willpower. The basic use of willpower Felicia had described already resembled the way he himself employed it. Even as he startled himself with the fact that he was already using willpower, another thought followed: if that was so, there had been no need to come to House Offen at all. Baltar could simply have taught him himself, instead of letting him waste his effort in a place like this.
But.
"That would not be so. As I said a moment ago, the willpower you handle, babe, is no better than that of an infant who has not yet cut a single tooth. To raise that level, the wise path is to receive instruction from someone who handles willpower well, as I do. Baltar, however, has never been a man skilled at teaching anyone, and since the late king passed he involves himself in the world's affairs even less. Sending you to me may well have been the greatest kindness he could show. ...He must truly cherish you, to go to such lengths. Hehe."
"That's a bit..."
Lee Han did not believe the man had sent him to Felicia out of any such meaningful intent. He might look like a Taoist immortal, but inside he was no different from a thoroughly eccentric madman.
He might have sent me on purpose just to mess with me.
Baltar would not have failed to know Felicia was this sort of person.
"...Your distrust of Baltar runs deep."
"Think of what I've suffered at that man's hands, and my teeth start to chatter."
"Hehe. Is it not simply that showing kindness feels awkward to him?"
"Hell. If he'd been a little more awkward, I'd have been off to Avalon ages ago."
Lee Han shuddered, recalling everything he had endured over the past three years, and Felicia laughed aloud once more. Soon enough, though—
"Even so, it is true that I can be of help to you. So let us train your willpower diligently together!"
"......"
She all but shouted a rallying cry and turned a passionate gaze on him. Meeting that look, Lee Han—
What is this? It's clearly a stroke of luck, so why do I feel...
...like the life is being sucked out of me?
Meanwhile, Iliad had been watching the whole scene from close by, and the look he offered was pure sympathy.
"...Sir Lee Han will have a hard time of it. Mother is wonderful in every other respect, but her passion is excessive..."
"Even so, it remains a great fortune, does it not? Those who wish to receive Her Grace's instruction are everywhere—not only in the kingdom, but across the whole continent."
"That is also true."
"......"
Elsa shut her mouth at once. In a flash she knew she had misspoken. She might not have known it with anyone else, but to say such a thing to Iliad of all people had been a grave mistake, and she recognized it quickly.
Sure enough.
"Elsa, I shall head back now."
"My lord..."
"I am fine. Pay it no mind."
"......"
"I said I am fine."
Iliad waved a hand at her—she was looking at him as if he were a child set down at the water's edge—and smiled brightly. But the moment he turned his face from Elsa and looked ahead, that face held something else.
Only stillness hung there. A stillness dark enough to be bleak.