A Knight Hates a Dysfunctional Family (5)
…Where does a story even swerve like this?
"…"
"D-do not look at me so."
"What's wrong with my eyes?"
"Th-that is the look one gives a criminal, is it not?"
"You can tell."
"!!?!"
He had sunk himself into the listening, and the blow only landed harder for it. Was this the horror of an adult pressing the original upon a child still bright-eyed over a fairy tale, and saying the real story had been there all along?
In every sense of the word—
Yeah. This one's historic.
A child abuser. Viewed one way, it was a cliché romance fantasy had simmered down to the dregs, but hearing the thing in the flesh was nothing but sickening. Lee Han felt he could despise her in earnest.
"W-wait! I-I see that some misunderstanding has taken root, but stop! All of it is a misunderstanding!"
"Sounds like the line every criminal keeps ready."
"I told you it is not! I will not deny that I was a poor parent. Even so, there were sound reasons for all of it, so hear a little more of what I have to say."
"…"
"…I am grateful you have composed yourself to listen, but do something about that gaze. I feel I shall be wounded by it…"
Felicia looked genuinely aggrieved, on the verge of tears, and went on as if muttering a complaint.
"I had already spent every year Heaven allotted me. Would it not have been the stranger thing, not to retire?"
Felicia was dying.
The coughing fits came closer together. Her arms shook so badly she could no longer even swing a sword, and her eyes had dimmed until simply seeing what lay ahead was a labor. She was sixty-five. Set against the average woman's lifespan in Pendragon—fifty-five—no one could begrudge the claim that she had lived long.
…But a long life was never the same thing as good fortune.
Rather the opposite.
"My lady!"
"E-Elsa. Bring the medicine."
"But that…"
"Quickly."
"…Yes, my lady."
She was a knight who had rolled across battlefields for years and carried wounds numbering in the hundreds, an adventurer and a hero who had wandered countless killing grounds and stopped calamities before they broke. For Felicia herself it was a proud history, the very footing on which she had grown. Sadly, the recoil of a youth spent throwing her body about had arrived right on time, and that body was ruined as thoroughly as a body can be ruined. Age, which no living thing can refuse, had come on top of it and was breaking her faster still.
Even the woman called Immortal Felicia, the Knight of Great Luck, could not outlast the span Heaven had measured, nor the simple passing of time.
Each day was an ordeal. Breathing itself hurt. Any morning might reasonably have been her last. And still Felicia refused to die, and the reason she endured was nothing else.
"Ah. I want to swing a sword even once more."
Mad as it sounded, she was not thrashing to stay alive for her house, or for her child. Only for the sword. She wanted to leave this world having swung it one more time. So she lived on doses of medicine laced with a narcotic that took the pain away. She knew full well it was a road that would ruin her body further, and she did not stop. At last even the narcotic could no longer press down the agony.
"Iliad. I am sorry."
"No, Mother. You have suffered so much."
"Heh. I am not dying yet."
"T-that is not what I meant…"
"Enough. My son. Come, let me hold you once."
"…"
"I am sorry for being such a poor mother. Truly sorry…"
"…To me, you are a mother far beyond anything I deserve, and one I revere. Please live as yourself until the very end. That is the mother I have looked up to, and loved…"
…In the end she passed the headship to her child and withdrew into seclusion. Calling it seclusion was generous. She had merely taken a room in the annex, no different from a last leaf that might fall at any moment.
"…It seems I shall be coming to see you before long."
At last she had not even the strength to twitch a finger. She thought of the husband who had gone ahead of her to Avalon, and a happy smile came to her lips—
"—and then, of a sudden, a thought came to me. Was I truly without the strength to swing a sword?"
"…"
"Yes. If I could not swing it with my body, might I not go on swinging it with my heart? Was it not right to keep pursuing the sword without end? And so I swung it with will."
"…"
"And at some moment, I became an Aura User."
"…So where did the middle go?"
"Heh. I recommend you not hear it. I have no wish to watch some promising child I have taken a liking to die on a futile attempt, simply because he listened."
"…"
Felicia became an Aura User. She was seventy-one. Among the countless Aura Users set down in history, she had come to it later than anyone, and the first woman ever to walk that path could not have been anyone but her.
The Military God sought her out once more. Baltar and Albert crossed swords with her, and in that meeting proved that the woman called Felicia was an Aura User.
"Hah! Is this what they mean by the triumph of a human being? Senior, you are a truly remarkable person."
"Take past, present, and future together, and I still cannot imagine another case like yours."
A lady knight without precedent, before or since. No one would be able to imitate her life, and no one would become an Aura User as she had. Those were the sincere judgments the two Aura Users cast at her, and the incident set the whole continent buzzing.
After that…
"Duke Felicia, I wish to receive your teaching."
"How does one become a knight like you?"
"C-could I become an Aura User as well?"
For a while she had to suffer an endless press of devotees, and the fortunes of House Offen began to swell at a tremendous pace. Was this not a house that had produced an Aura User? Disciples multiplying beyond all count was only natural, and merchants hoping for even the slightest tie to her reached the point of begging her to take their money away. To exaggerate only a little, the might of House Offen in those days could stand even with the royal house.
…Felicia knew this current was by no means a good one. And so—
"I am still retired, and I have not the slightest intention of returning to active duty. Therefore, anyone who wants something from House Offen, go home. You will gain no reward from me."
Only after she had spoken a sincerity edged with warning did House Offen settle back toward what it had been. Well. The Aura User effect had already carried the house past even the height of its golden age, so perhaps it had not returned to normal in any simple sense.
In any case, through that season the family gradually grew steady. The energy of life—of aura—filled her from head to heel and restored her, not as a woman in her seventies but in the likeness of her prime, her forties. At once—
"I can train the sword again…!"
She spared no thought for youth regained, nor even for having become a Superhuman. That she could swing a sword with her own hands again made her happier than anything in the world.
"Funny, isn't it? It was a life in which the sword betrayed me. But I never let it go, and because I loved it they called me a great swordswoman, far above my station. An irony."
"Aren't you selling yourself a little short? You, a Superhuman."
"Heh. It cannot be helped. In truth, my swordsmanship is still hopelessly wanting."
"…Lay the false modesty on any thicker and you're looking at murder."
"I-I am speaking nothing but the strictest truth! Ah, child, you have taken my sword yourself, have you not? You know how far my blade sits from the swords of geniuses."
"Did it?"
"…You were hardly the talented sort either, were you, child? I see I sought the wrong person to commiserate with."
"…Goddamn it."
She knew it could sound like false modesty to other people. In truth, the swordsmanship Felicia had polished across a whole life was nothing so special. Natural enough, if one thought about it. There was a reason she had been called the worst talent in the history of House Offen.
She was a dullard among dullards, a swordswoman cursed with a comprehension that, taught one measure, barely digested a tenth. And yet she was called Sword Duke, and in her forties, at the height of her prime, she became a Hero, for the simple reason that she herself had grown strong by coming through battle after battle. It was not that the sword art was strong.
"In a sense, not unlike you."
"…Hm."
A swordswoman who had drilled nothing but the cut and the thrust, without end, until she could deliver a cut and a thrust no one could stop. That was the identity of the swordswoman called Felicia, and becoming an Aura User had not changed it. So she was still a challenger, a seeker walking a road of the sword that had no end.
And yet…
"Mother, is the swordsmanship you perform meant to be done like this?"
"…"
"M-Mother?"
"…So this is what it means to be a genius."
"Pardon?"
Watching her son catch seventy years of her life in a mere ten days, Felicia felt hollowness and pride at the same time. The one whom the sword loved more than anyone was her own son, Iliad.
"It was astonishing. That child saw the most ideal swordsmanship I could perform, once, and imitated it on the spot. Before a week was out he had understood what the art meant, and when a fortnight had passed he had absorbed the whole of my swordsmanship and created a new art entirely."
"You're not exaggerating just because he's your own son?"
"Absolutely not. I watched it as it happened, and the house has witnesses to spare. Seize anyone you like and ask."
"…Hell of a man."
"Yes. He was tremendous."
Iliad had only just passed twenty. He carried out a family head's work to perfection, and in the midst of it sought old records and Felicia's former comrades for counsel, and on top of all that published a fairy tale—a schedule that bordered on madness. The great masterpiece later called the Lady Knight series was something he created even while learning the duties of a head and the way of the sword.
What magnificent talent was this? Felicia came to think her child might become a greater swordsman than anyone in history. He had already surpassed her own art. In ten years he would stand among the ten best in the kingdom, and in twenty he would be the greatest. She was certain. It was not simply that he was a genius, nor that he was her son and a mother's fondness had put a film over her eyes.
"Mother, if I do it like this, is that correct?"
"Already handling willpower that way! Astounding! Astounding, Iliad!"
"Th-thank you."
Yes. Iliad, too, devoted himself to the sword. He had not only talent, but sincerity and effort besides, and there came a moment when he could even wield willpower. How tremendous a thing was that?
"Learn this as well. It is a copy of a sword art I obtained long ago, in an ancient temple."
"I-I will try."
"Yes. You, of all people, will become a great swordsman. Even this talentless mother managed it. How could you fail?"
"…Yes."
The swordsman called Iliad grew more complete by the day, and the family sword arts he recreated and mended numbered past several dozen. Felicia was proud of such a son, and thought him admirable.
Then, one day.
"Mother… how does one become an Aura User?"
Iliad asked the way.
"Hm? Ah. Do you already wish to come as far as this mother has come? You might just as well take it one step at a time."
"I am not trying to be greedy. I only wonder what the method of becoming an Aura User is. It is not handed down in any record, is it?"
"There is a reason for that, of a sort. To become an Aura User, one must put one's life on the line."
"One's life…"
"Heh. Think of it as the process by which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly."
"Then, could you teach me only the how of it? I wish to write it down."
"Hmm…"
"Mother."
"…Very well. You would not act foolishly."
Felicia trusted her son. A son incomparably finer than herself. A pride who always did more than she expected. So she thought nothing would come of it.
And this choice—
"I-Iliad! C-come to your senses, Iliad!"
The day she saw her child dying, Felicia very nearly went mad. Her whole body shook, and terror ate her judgment until it blurred.
"Why—why a choice like this?!"
Even as she screamed it, she could not find the reason. Why had her son attempted something so foolish without a single word to her? That wise child—how?
But the reason could wait.
And so Felicia—
"…simply poured aura into him, crude as a brute. Among the energies a human possesses, aura holds the purest and strongest life, and fortunately mine overflowed like the sea. I barely slowed Iliad's death, and only after I had brought to bear even the ancient elixirs gathered from temple after temple did Iliad return to the living."
"Some miracle."
"A miracle. Yes, it was a miracle. That day, for the first time, I was moved to give thanks that a thing called god existed."
"…"
"But perhaps it was the price of defying death. Iliad became a body that could never swing a sword again."
A broken body. Iliad would never use his legs for the rest of his life. As the price of a life returned, one might even call it cheap.
"It was the day Iliad the swordsman died. And yet… strangely, even hearing that, Iliad looked relieved. As if he were glad it had turned out this way. And I thought: perhaps that child had never liked the sword so very much."
"…"
"Because of me. Because of a worthless parent, had he gone on learning the sword by force? The doubt and the guilt never left me."
"…Did you ask him?"
"…No. I could not. Even after he woke, the child gave me no answer at all. He simply went on as a wise head of house, and as a writer. I, too, decided that was enough."
"Coward."
"Heh. When you become a parent, child, you will understand. In the matter of one's own child, every parent is doomed to be a coward."
"…"
She laughed, bleak and thin, and Lee Han did not rebuke her any further.
No. To be precise.
"But why did he do it, really? Why did that brilliant, radiant child choose an option like that? I still cannot understand it in the least."
"Wh-what…?"
He had meant not to scold her. Hearing her go on, he had no choice but to speak.
"How can you not know?"
"Hm?"
"Do you actually not know? Or are you trying not to?"
"??"
"…I could lose my damn mind."
He could see the reason plainly enough himself, and yet the person it belonged to wore a face that knew nothing. It choked him. And with that, he understood.
The woman called the Sword Duke was, truly—
"…?"
—as a human being, hopelessly lacking.