A Knight Hates a Dysfunctional House (2)
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Thuuud—!
"...Even if I never make knight, I won't have to worry about eating, will I?"
Lee Han tried driving nails with his fist—no, with his palm—and they sank in with alarming ease. He could have managed nails with his fists before, of course. Doing it barehanded, without Gyeong, sometimes left the skin smarting, and now and then it split. This time he used no technique at all. He drove them with nothing but his hands, and not only did his palms stay perfectly intact, a whole chair came together, clean and solid.
He gave it a tap.
"I threw this together. Why did it come out so sturdy?"
The handmade chair—wood split and shaped with the edge of his hand, no tools whatever—was crude, but it held. There was still finishing work everywhere. The mere fact that bare hands could do this much was already a monstrous thing.
Why would woodworking need a hammer and a saw? His fist was the hammer, and the edge of his hand the saw. He seemed to be proving it with perfect confidence.
"Only now do you begin to understand what it means to govern Intent."
"...Do Aura Users always have to show up without a sound, or the day isn't complete?"
"Heh. The older one gets, the more one enjoys a little mischief."
Felicia had taken the space at his back without his noticing. She laughed like a child caught in a prank and sat down in the chair he had made.
"Quite decent."
Whether the chair pleased her or not, she nodded a few times, then looked over his upper body.
"So. Answer me. Do you understand what it means to handle Intent?"
"...Honestly, I still don't have a feel for it."
"How frank."
"Still..."
Crack!
"—I think I get, a little, why you told me to train with my head and not my body."
The edge of Lee Han's hand split a thick log clean in half. Like an axe.
At first he floundered badly. He had no sense of how one was supposed to train with the mind. He floundered, but he did not complicate it.
Just try it. What else is there?
He was not the sort to knot a problem into something elaborate. He was no theorist. He was the kind who threw his body at a thing and took whatever the collision gave him. So instead of over-reading Felicia's words, Lee Han followed them as they stood.
Train with the heart—that is, with an image?
So he did. Image training. In his imagination he did the heavy work: barbell squats and the rest. Only, when he imagined—
Ah. This isn't it.
—he dug in, stubbornly, so the picture would come out in finer detail. Felicia had not told him to chase detail. It was simply a point on which he could not compromise, and so he fixed on it. His nature would not allow him to do anything halfway. Even when he was wasting his time, giving it everything he had was a creed of his life.
Like a fussy designer, he kept boring into the particulars. Roughly speaking, what he bored into was this: the posture he took when he trained, and the tremor in the muscle; how heavy the weight he lifted actually was; how much he sweated, and how he got hurt; how long the body took to recover after violent training. Weighing every such factor, Lee Han succeeded in building an image truly close to reality, and there were days he spent from dawn to dark doing nothing but digging into detail and training.
...And when it was over, a certain self-loathing set in. Something like the emptiness after an imaginary romance?
If image training and an imaginary romance had one stark difference, though, it was this.
What? When did I sweat this much?
...It touched reality.
A sweat close to what he had shed inside the image now soaked him head to foot. At first he was simply baffled, and wondered if it was chance.
Drip. Drip.
...There it is again.
When a coincidence repeated itself twice, it stopped being coincidence. He would close his eyes, finish the training, open them, and find himself drenched, and it kept happening until he understood that the training worked. After a run of further trials, he learned what mattered: extreme detail, and concentration. Let either slip even a little, and he did not so much as sweat. All he got was the sour feeling of having wasted his time on nonsense.
...From a certain point on, Lee Han worked to fold image training into ordinary life. At first he tried to manage it while eating, or while walking. It was a finicky business, but now, on a light stroll, he could walk and still call up an image of basic swordsmanship, or of throwing a jab, as easily as he liked.
...Well. He often tripped in the course of it, and he had rolled down a hill or two. Fortunately, no one had seen—
"Puhaha! Forget a fool—what kind of dumbass...!"
"There's an old saying. Take a hit to the back of the head, and you lose your memory."
"...Huh? Why am I here?"
"......"
"...Ahem."
"Hm."
There had been one assistant instructor, granted. Lee Han trusted the man would not dare run his mouth anywhere. If he blabbed, Lee Han fully intended to test whether memory loss could be induced by hand.
Anyway, nine days passed through trial and error of that sort, and as of now, Lee Han's body...
"—The weight of the muscle has definitely gone down. It feels like the useless muscle dropped away."
Ever since the fairy rebuilt him, Lee Han had thought his body perfect. Bone and muscle, ligament and tendon, all of it might as well have been new, and it held a flawless golden balance. Through image training, though, he realized that his still-lacking body could go further toward completeness.
"The bones got stronger, sure, but my senses developed too. Not so far that they slip my control. More precisely, I can handle them the way I want now."
It was uncanny past all reason, and Felicia nodded as if it were only natural.
"The result of tempering the martial way through Intent. Willpower carved your body down, so it could become the most ideal form you are able to imagine."
"...Didn't you say you'd forgotten all the theory?"
"Talking with you, scraps of it have begun to come back."
"......"
"I-it really is true..."
"...Who said otherwise."
Lee Han decided he would interrogate her no further, and asked her to explain in detail what was happening in his body. Felicia went on,
"You do seem to treat me far too carelessly..."
grumbling even as she explained.
...Watch her a while, and it was convenient enough. She grumbled, and still granted every request.
"Ahem. As you know, the human body has a limit to how far it can be trained. Even one born under heaven's blessing will, someday, meet a ceiling. Learn to wield willpower, however, and the story changes."
Whoosh!
She swung the wooden sword in her hand, lightly.
"—Even this becomes possible."
She had swung it like a joke. What that single swing produced...
Shhhk—!
...was nothing one could dismiss as a joke.
"Did you see? This is the fruit of training the sword through Intent."
"......"
Lee Han stared at what she had cut, and blinked. For crying out loud.
A wooden sword can split a cloud in half?
...He had called her a monster as a joke. Only now did he realize that great monster was the accurate term.
Iliad offered him tea.
He had tasted the honey Lee Han brought as a gift, eyes going wide, and insisted that something so precious ought to be drunk as tea. Somehow the two of them had ended up sitting down to it. As Lee Han drank, a floral scent that was already strong spread thick through his mouth—a mysterious flavor—and he was quietly admiring how right Iliad had been when the man spoke of willpower.
"Yes?"
"Haha. Mother isn't explaining the theory very well, is she. So I'm reciting, for a moment, what I heard long ago."
"I-I'm grateful, but... now?"
If he meant to say it, he might have said it nine days ago. Lee Han let a little of that complaint show. Iliad only put on a bright, innocent face.
"Isn't coming to know it yourself, and meeting it in the body, better than some vague explanation? I hear from Arno that Sir Lee Han often gives his students that very advice."
"...You really know how to leave a man with nothing to say."
Living it once beats a hundred explanations twice over. That was a teaching he gave his own disciples often, and Lee Han had no rebuttal. He had no choice but to accept. Hearing it after nine days of change in his own body, the explanation landed far more deeply.
"To add a little in Mother's place, willpower may be called the road that breaks the limits of a human being. For an example... yes. Muscle will do."
"Muscle?"
"Yes. As you know, Sir, the human body is unreasonable in a great many places. Rest from exercise for a single day, and muscle shrinks. Flesh sags."
"That's true enough."
Lee Han knew it well. Two years ago, wiping out a rather strong mage and a slave caravan all at once, he had overreached. The injuries were severe, and for more than a week he had not trained at all. And for resting a mere week, muscle left him and fat began to cling. How hollow that had felt.
"...Muscle is a rotten bargain. The return never matches the work you put in."
"Yes. That is it. But once you can handle willpower freely, the story changes."
"......"
"Mother told you, didn't she? The more you accumulate training through will, the closer you come to the ideal you desire. That is the first step in breaking human limits."
"...You mean the muscle stops falling off?"
"If that is the image you desire, Sir, then it would become so."
"Then what's the image the Sword Duke draws? Ah—is that a secret of the house?"
"Haha. Nothing of the sort. Even if one knew, would there be anyone who could imitate her, or stop her?"
Iliad laughed as if he had heard something delightful, and told him the Sword Duke's ideal without the least reserve.
"Mother held to an ideal. She wished to wield an invincible sword art. So all her life she swung the sword every day. In imagination and in dreams, she swung it every single day—without missing one."
"...Not a day?"
"Yes. From the age of five, when she first took up the sword, not a single day omitted. So she has lived that way for roughly eighty-five years."
"......"
Lee Han did not ask, like a fool, whether such a thing was possible. It was plainly madness, close to frenzy, a thing that seemed to belong to an impossible realm. But if the person in question had risen to Aura User...
Then it makes perfect sense.
One must not try to understand them from an ordinary person's point of view. No. Even a madman probably could not understand an Aura User. They simply—
do it, because they can.
Not people insane about some particular thing. People who merely did what they were able to do. Only, what they did was impossible for anyone else, and so they were called Superhumans.
"Upon that ideal, Mother always imagined the most powerful sword art she herself could unfold. Of course an ideal art of that kind was not finished all at once. She survived countless crises, battlefields among them, and revised the art step by step. Decades passed. When the ideal sword art was about half complete... I am told people began to call her Sword Duke."
"...That's incredible."
Respect rose in him just from the hearing of it. She had only trained the sword art she herself thought ideal, and at some moment she stood at the summit. Aura Users really did have talent on a ridiculous—
"—She is incredible, yes. There was a time she was called the least talented swordsman, the shame of House Offen, a good-for-nothing. And she came that far."
"......?"
"Ah, is this your first time hearing it? It's a fairly famous story in the kingdom..."
With a soft rustle, Iliad produced a fairy-tale book.
The Foolish Lady Knight
Volume I
Written and Illustrated by Iliad
The title was The Foolish Lady Knight, a name that carried even a hint of mockery, and the fairy tale did not end with the first volume.
"Personally, I enjoy the second, The Lady Knight of Defeat, and the third, The Lady Knight of Victory. The fourth, The Lady Knight's Glory, and the fifth, The Lady Knight's Love, are honestly a little embarrassing. Drawing my parents' romance... well, it's rather shameful."
"......"
"Ah, for reference, there are ten volumes. If you're curious, I'll give you all of them."
"...Excuse me. The author's name seems to say Iliad. Am I seeing things?"
"You are not. You saw it exactly."
"...A namesake?"
"No. Haha!"
"......"
...That Iliad de Offen was one of the ten fairy-tale writers chosen by the people of the continent, and that the Lady Knight series he drew had sold more than a hundred million copies across the South, the West, the East, and the Central Continent—Lee Han learned that the next day, from his disciples.