A Knight Hates a Mess (7)
"...No, seriously. A bee that can slaughter hundreds of hornets all by itself—how did you even tame something like that?"
Faced with a student whose curiosity was entirely sincere, Lee Han answered with nothing more than a light shrug.
"I didn't do a thing. First time we met, we just talked a little. Second time, I gave them a potion as a gift. After that they started coming up to me on their own, and next thing I knew they were building a house in the woods by my place."
"And with nothing more than that, you got your hands on the Champion of the honeybees. I can't even believe it..."
"Got my hands on them? I told you, we just became friends."
"...Not servants?"
A deep, heavy buzz. Lee Han's newly befriended and remarkably clever honeybee friends set a glass of water down where he sat. Strong as they were, two of them lightly carried a cup weighing dozens of times their own bodies. One look, and it was obvious why they had collected so many grandiose titles.
"Ahem. Friends, I said."
By way of thanks, Lee Han held out a bundle of fruit. To his servants. No—to the bees.
The buzz came back fierce. Aigoo, they were beside themselves.
"F-fruit?"
"They'll eat pretty much anything. Meat, even. But sweet fruit's what they like best. Pineapple, mango, that sort of thing. Real fancy palates on these guys."
"...And that didn't strike you as strange?"
"They're spirit insects. I figured that was just how they were."
Derek had nothing to say to that.
"More to the point, why are you here? You didn't even send word."
Lee Han stopped fussing over his new friends and jerked his chin, blunt as a slammed door, as if to say he might as well hear the reason. The coldness in it was plain, and Derek flinched.
"I-Instructor, a-are you angry?"
"Angry? Illegally ditching class to run around with your girlfriend—what's the crime in that?"
"So you are angry..."
"I said I'm not. I just think you're an ungrateful little bastard, that's all."
"...That is you being angry."
Derek hung his head. They say a man knows his own sins best. Derek, who had quite a lot to feel guilty about—no, a considerable amount—broke into a sweat.
...Even so, if he were allowed a little excuse.
"I-I've been busy in my own way, too. I analyzed the situation from the information you were kind enough to give me, dealt with the villains who show up in the side chapters, worked with Young Master Roen and took one of them down, and also..."
"And played at romance?"
"..."
"Not even denying it now? Next time you'll show up somebody's father, you brat."
"W-we've barely even held hands..."
"So while I was out there suffering, you really were dating?"
Derek's eyes went wide.
The world really was a filthy place. Was everyone but him out there falling in love and tending some pretty little romance? It was enough to make a man bitter.
Right. This is why I hated Christmas.
Christmas, at least, he tried to look on with some goodwill, it being the season when the nation's birth rate shot up. But any day with a fourteen in it—when chocolate sold like nothing else—was the day Lee Han hated most.
He was still regarding Derek with that cooled, vinegar stare when Derek, desperate to change the subject, started spilling excuses.
"A-anyway, I didn't skip your lectures for nothing. P-please believe me, Instructor..."
"Bullshit. You think I don't know you? You only come looking for me when you need help, or when you've got something to ask. If it isn't one of those, you don't show your face at all."
"..."
"See? I knew it."
"...I'm just trash..."
Derek promptly planted his face in the dirt. Any further excuse would only have put his own ingratitude on display.
...This kid's been through it.
He said it that way, but the calluses driven into Taechang's palms, and the scars and wounds carved here and there over his body, told Lee Han plainly enough that the boy had been working hard in his own way.
Hm. He and Geomdung brought down one of the great merchant companies, was it?
From what he had heard, Taechang had joined forces with Geomdung and fought a brutal engagement against a great merchant company. That company, for the record, had been the cult bastards' purse strings.
Toppling a conglomerate, and they didn't even cut me in.
In this world, the outfits called great merchant companies were conglomerates at the very least—collectives so powerful they might as well have been called megacorps. The clout built on gold was formidable enough, but they also kept mercenary bands and combat units worthy of that clout. For two students to have brought such people down was more than enough to be proud of, and Lee Han knew that better than anyone. Even so, unless they said with their own mouths whom they had fought, he had decided he would not praise them.
These brats. Showing consideration in the strangest places.
It was probably kindness, born of knowing how mindlessly busy he had been of late. Lee Han scolded that consideration even as a satisfied smile settled on his mouth. Somewhere in it, he had the feeling the boys had grown, if only a little.
...Have I gotten old?
For no good reason, the tip of his nose stung. The feeling did not last. For no other reason than—
"Instructor, y-you said you met the head of the Offen Estate recently, right?"
"Hm?"
"I-I know this is a strange question, but... was he... living well?"
Lee Han said nothing.
"H-he wasn't, um, a zombie or anything, was he?"
"...Plant it."
"Pardon?"
"Plant your head, you brat."
"..."
"Execute."
"E-execute...!"
It was an outrageous thing for Taechang to say, treating a perfectly living man as a zombie, and Lee Han clicked his tongue. Honestly.
I want to praise him, and he won't even let me. This kid.
This was why people said the mouth was the root of all evil.
"—You're saying he was someone who should have died?"
"Y-yes..."
Derek, fresh from some fifteen minutes of punishment burpees, brushed the dirt from his hair and looked ready to cry. Lee Han pretended not to see it and cocked his head.
"...He looked perfectly fine."
He thought of Iliad, whom he had met half a day ago. More than fine—so absorbed in preparing a new work that his clothes were covered in paint. And that man was originally supposed to...
"Someone who should have died half a year ago... Hm. You're not remembering it wrong?"
"I-I don't think so? I remember this one for certain. As far as I know, the head of the Offen Estate was a man who should have left the world half a year ago."
"...Cause of death?"
"Y-you're believing me?"
"You're not the sort to talk nonsense."
"Th-thank you."
"Save the thanks. Keep talking."
"Uh, so..."
Derek's further account went like this.
"I didn't see him die with my own eyes, of course. But there's a line like that in Mr. Arno's dialogue."
"Game dialogue?"
"Yes. The line was definitely..."
It would have been the line from the scene in which a second-year Arno, eyes full of melancholy, happened upon the heroine and fell into conversation with her.
"You mean my father? He passed not long after I entered the academy. His chronic illness took a turn for the worse..."
"...Like that. When he dies, Mr. Arno becomes the next head, but he yields the seat to the Sword Duke and joins the mercenary company Mr. Garand founds, so he can see something of the world. After that, with Kunta beside him, the company rises to number two, and he becomes a mercenary whose name rings across the continent. That's the heart of Heroes of the Extra—the side story."
"...There's a side story, too?"
"It was a game our company put real heart into, in its own way. The content is honestly enormous."
Lee Han was quiet.
"Instructor?"
"...No matter how I look at it, it doesn't make sense."
"Huh? Oh, you mean how a game like that could come out of Korea? The investor was a little extraordinary, so..."
"Not that. ...That man was incredibly healthy. A chronic illness?"
Derek only stared.
"That can't be right...?"
He was not judging without grounds. Lee Han was no physician, but if he simply used his senses well, reading a person's health was no difficult thing. Telling a healthy man from a sick one was easy enough. In that sense—
"Forget a chronic illness. His body was sound enough for a long, untroubled life."
Lee Han was certain. The leg might have troubled him a little, but there was no chronic illness in that man. Which meant—
"Either you remembered it wrong, or something got twisted."
"Twisted?"
"Honestly. Have we kicked up a lot of dust?"
"...Strictly speaking, not we. You, personally, Instructor..."
"Hss—! Mouth."
Derek shut it.
Impudent as Taechang's words were, Lee Han had likely already changed a great many of the things that were supposed to happen. Even a butterfly's small wingbeat altered much, and Lee Han had gone and become the typhoon itself.
I did smash quite a lot, didn't I?
Lee Han quietly spread his fingers, counting the messes he had made from the three years since he became a knight.
"Those ones I handed over to my sister. The mages, I killed. The slave companies... how many of those did I wipe out?"
Derek had no answer.
"Ahem. Well. Minor details."
"...What in the world have you been doing out there?"
"Just living hard."
"...Live a little harder and a meteor's going to fall."
"Saw one two years ago."
"..."
"Stopping it was a bit of work."
"...No, what..."
Taechang burned with a violent curiosity about Lee Han's past. Lee Han, caring nothing for that, turned his thoughts to the matter of the Offen Estate.
If the boy was right, then something had changed because of the enormous butterfly that was Lee Han himself, and because of it Iliad—who ought to have left the world—was alive. A glad thing. Something he ought to feel proud of. And yet.
...It sits wrong.
He was certain once more. That man Iliad had no chronic illness of any kind. Even so, the wolf pup—the one in the game—had said he died of one. The story did not fit together front to back, and on the off chance, Lee Han meant to ask one thing more.
"Say. That woman..."
But—
Crash!
"...?"
He had no time to finish the question. The words stopped as he took in the enormous bulk tumbling through his front yard.
"...Bulk?"
"In-Instructor. K-Kunta... hurt."
Lee Han said nothing.
Kunta, cut up from head to toe, wheezed and pleaded his pain, and Lee Han, with no room to worry over him, looked at Derek.
"...You little god of disasters?"
"...I-is this my fault!!?"
"Yeah."
Derek had nothing to say to that.
Somehow Lee Han had arrived at the perfectly reasonable conclusion that if this one had simply kept his mouth shut today, none of this would have happened.
"K-Kunta... hurt...?"
Kunta pulled a tearful face, giving voice to the sorrow of no one tending his pain. This was why a foreigner's life in a strange land was such a melancholy thing.