A Knight Hates a Mess (1)
Whoooosh!
The wind blew — a forest wind, cool and glad to be felt. The season had a bite to it, so the air came a little cold, but the scent riding it was not a bad one. Rain had fallen at dawn. The smell of it lingered in the breeze, and that, too, was a scent he liked.
"Hm?"
Partway along, something sweet threaded thickly through the wind and brushed past his nose. A deep fragrance, its sweetness nothing like sugar. Slowly, he turned his feet toward the place it came from.
Fweet, fweet! Slopes and boulders, hanging vines and pits of mud — the forest was one long snare of natural traps, and he ran through it as freely as any four-legged beast. Look only at the muscle packed onto that body and you would expect him to move like a stone. In truth he was quicker than the animals, and lighter.
Where he arrived, bees were in the air.
Bzzzt! Bzzzzzt!
Ought he to marvel that bees were still flying in weather like this? In Pendragon, it was nothing unusual. Whether by the influence of Mystery or not, this was the South, a land seething with wondrous life — spirit beasts, spirit insects, spirit trees. Autumn had come, and still those bees labored without rest. They were surely a kind of spirit insect.
Bzzzzzt?!!
Bewilderment showed in the way they moved. Spirit insects indeed. A little intelligence in them, and they kept a disciplined march no ordinary bee would ever manage.
A bit sorry, that.
He was sorry, in his way. Live deep enough inside a forest this dangerous and you had every right never to meet a person at all. How were the bees supposed to have predicted that some human would come this far on what he was pleased to call a light stroll? Once they got past the crisis named him, the bees whose nesting ground had been found would pull up at once and seek another. Autumn ran long in Pendragon, yes. Even so, for bees to relocate at a moment like this would not be wise.
So he spoke.
"Moving won't be the smart play."
Bzzzt!?
He was attempting a conversation.
"No idea if you understand me, but take the advice and just stay put. Believe it or don't — I don't want anything from you, and I'm not after your honey. My mouth isn't loose enough to go talking about you, either."
Bzzzzzt...
"Whether you believe me is your business. ...What am I even doing."
Talking to bees. Call them spiritual all you liked; anyone watching would have said he was mad.
"...Be well."
A flicker of self-disgust caught him, and he meant to be gone at once. He turned on the spot.
Except—
Bzzzt!
"Huh?"
Bzzzt—!
"Y-you're giving that to me?"
Bzz.
The man — no. Lee Han scratched at his cheek, took the piece of comb the bees were holding out, and let a hollow laugh escape him.
"...Live two lifetimes, and you still end up taking bribes from bees."
He had prided himself on having already been through every strange thing there was to be through. Apparently that pride had been early.
"...Wood-Honey."
Among wild honeys, it was one of the names that stood as high as stone-honey. And this Wood-Honey belonged to none other than spirit honeybees — spirit insects with a true spark of mind in them. Ordinary Wood-Honey already fetched a respectable price. Honey from spirit-insect bees would be rare past any measuring. It was, quite literally, picking gold up off the roadside.
From where Lee Han stood, however—
"...Forget it. Take it back. Feels like I'm robbing you, damn it."
Bzzzzzt?
"It's not that I don't want it. I'm really fine."
Bzzzzzt...
"No, don't look disappointed... Fuck's sake. What am I actually doing with a bunch of bees?"
Why was he playing hard to get with bees, in a place like this? He could make no sense of it, and the whole dizzy business left him no way out. In the end Lee Han had to take the Wood-Honey.
And then—
"Since I took it, I'll bring a gift the next time I come down this path. Call it payment."
Bzzzt?
"A potion ought to do. Or should I try teaching you Gyeong?"
Bzzzzzt??
"Well. I'll eat it gladly."
With that Lee Han shot down the mountain like an arrow, and for a long while the bees held their eyes on him as he went.
Bzzzt!
Drip!
"What is this? Why is it so good...?"
He had eaten Wood-Honey a few times before. This was a different order of thing entirely. A fragrance of flowers spread through his mouth until it filled it — that was one matter — and then, all at once, vigor began to move in his body, the same property a potion had. Spirit insects, sure enough. Even their honey was not honey raised the ordinary way.
He was eating, unable to hide his wonder at the taste and the effect, when—
Rustle.
"...Having a fine time, are you, eating something delicious all by yourself?"
A white-haired woman, come up on him without his knowing when, took him to task.
"Why are you here?"
"I might ask why you are coming out of there."
"Because it's a shortcut?"
"...Quite the madman, you are. Do you even know how thick that forest is with monsters and venomous things?"
"A monster comes out, I kill it, and that's the end of it. Poison — thanks to the fairy, I'm Immune to a Thousand Poisons, so I'll probably be fine."
"Im— a thousand poisons? What?"
"Anyway. Have some honey."
"No, what I was saying— oh! What is this!?"
She was a woman who must have tasted every delicacy of land and sea, invited as she had been to the Royal Castle and into any number of great houses. Sword Duke Felicia clapped like a seal over a mere mouthful of honey. Lee Han shrugged and told her not to ask where it had come from. He had an obligation to keep the bees safe from this monster. Let her go looking for honey and she would wreck the ecosystem before she was done.
Felicia had been rejoicing without pause, lost in the taste, but she soon came back to herself and cleared her throat, as if ashamed of the display.
"Ahem. M-more to the point, what possessed you to come through a forest path like that? You might simply have taken the road, like a sensible person."
"Come that way and it's a waste of time. Cutting through the forest saves me three whole hours. Better."
"An absurd fellow, indeed..."
Over the past ten days, keeping company with Lee Han, Felicia had said that sort of thing often.
An absurd fellow.
He was only going about his days the way he always did. Why he had to hear himself judged for it, he had no idea.
"You might simply remain on our estate. I cannot fathom why you insist on coming and going."
"I'm not some unemployed bum. I have a job, for the record. These days I'm even getting offers to be a professor."
"...Ha."
"Work ends, there's time left over, I come for tutoring. I don't have the hours to focus on nothing but this."
To call it tutoring — and not just anyone's teaching, but Felicia's — was a remark that left even her with nothing to say. She was not the sort who enjoyed being held up by other people. Even so, she had always stood where longing and respect were aimed at her, and Lee Han's air of having nothing to regret in the bargain was, in more ways than one, a strange thing to meet.
"...Had the knights of the kingdom heard those words, they would have beaten you senseless."
"Wouldn't they be the ones getting beaten senseless by me?"
"...Impudent brat. Are you that eager to win an argument against an old woman?"
There was no telling, looking at her, what part of the Sword Duke was supposed to be old — Rejuvenation had seen to that — and still she went on grumbling. Even so.
"Even so, you keep your promises. That much diligence, I suppose, must be acknowledged."
Whatever else she thought, Felicia gave a small nod, granting that his honesty was worth the recognition.
"Your body has grown a little slimmer."
"...Damn it."
"Now, now."
A curse came up at once, and Lee Han's brow tightened. A slimmer body was no compliment at all. Not to him. Why?
"I think I've lost a good two kilograms of muscle."
What had gone was not fat. It was muscle. Lee Han was miserable.
"Twenty grams, surely. Such exaggeration."
"To me, even twenty grams is sadder than gold pouring away."
"Dramatics."
"...You don't understand this feeling."
"I-is it truly so sad a thing?"
Lee Han looked at Felicia, who could ask a question that barely belonged to a human being, and the stare he gave her was pure disbelief. A moment later he decided he ought to have expected it.
Figures. That fiend would be exactly like this.
Sword Duke Felicia, as Lee Han saw her—
She doesn't understand how people feel.
More precisely, she did not understand the heart of a man who lived in a gym. To Lee Han, it came to the same thing.
"For the time being, you are not to do any training that loads the body."
Felicia had sentenced Lee Han to a ban on training.
And not loading the body meant, in practice—
"You're telling me not to do strength training?"
"That is correct."
"Skip even a day and the muscle goes. You know that?"
"Hm? And is that some kind of problem?"
"...We're not going to be able to talk to each other, are we."
To him, the notice was a bolt out of a clear sky.
Had he been a man who never trained, it might have been nothing. He was a man who had, at times, given eighteen of the twenty-four hours in a day to exercise. Telling him to skip it was the same as telling him not to eat, and it was the sort of order a person was obliged to fight. And yet—
"Train with the mind, not the body. That will be of help to you."
"...What kind of prick—"
"Now, now! A pretty word!"
"......Like a puppy."
"That is cute, is it not, rather than pretty?"
"...I'm losing my mind."
Felicia was laying out the theory of some cult, and Lee Han could feel his blood climbing. Had the woman across from him been anyone but the great swordswoman called the Sword Duke, the curses would already have been out of his mouth.
"At the years I've put in, what is this talk of mind training even supposed to mean..."
Lee Han knew that training in the imagination — image training — had an effect of its own. But if you asked whether that was better than actually moving the body—
Well?
Lee Han, at least, stood with the side that believed you got more from training by moving. More than that, three unbroken years of strength work had sunk into him and into his life until it was no exaggeration to call them the same thing. To be told now, of all times, not to move his body and to make do with imagined training was a hard thing to swallow.
"Now, now. So many complaints. This, too, is a method of training, meant to temper the will. Trust me, and try following along."
"...Explain it theoretically, at least."
Felicia was silent.
"Hey."
"Ahem. W-when I underwent Rejuvenation, my memory suffered somewhat, you see. I know perfectly well that this is a help, in theory, but to explain it in any detail is a little..."
Lee Han said nothing.
"A-anyway, trust me and follow along. Should it prove to have no effect, I say this upon my name: I shall compensate you however you wish."
"...Just so you know. Every tenth of a gram of muscle I lose gets logged as a grudge."
She was silent again.
In the end, Lee Han decided he would follow the cult theory.
Why so little resistance?
Because—
"...You're the Sword Duke. You wouldn't scam me."
"I can hear every word, you brat!"
"That's why I'm saying it."
"...Shall we hold a little exorcism today."
"Far be it from me to refuse."
This time it was not branches. Nine wooden swords took to the air and leveled themselves at him.
"Strong, though. Filthy strong..."
A loser has nothing to say. As if taking that for his excuse, Lee Han — beaten black and blue — swallowed his tears and decided he would obey Felicia without another word.
He truly forbade himself every last kind of training. Heavy squats, the bench press, every implement he owned: he cut them all off. The most he still did was walk the grounds now and then, or spar with the students.
Even that, however—
"I told you to skip the training and play to your heart's content! In its place, apply yourself with the mind alone."
—was forbidden by Felicia all over again, and Lee Han had no choice but to give up sparring as well.
In exchange he had to abandon training with the students, too, and send the kids out under the name of public service — no, of training — to see to the damaged facilities of the temples, here and there.
And now, some nine days on...
"—What? How is this possible?"
Astonishingly, his muscle had shrunk by a whole twenty grams. And yet—
"Why are my bones harder?"
What he was forced to find absurd was that, in exchange, the very sinew and bone of him had only grown harder.
Clang!
"...Guess I won't need a hammer when I drive a nail anymore."
A fist would do.