A Knight Does Not Speak Falsehoods (1)
Lee Han had far too many questions.
What could possibly have happened in the five hours or so since he left the estate? And his half-wild disciple—why...
"...are you this torn to shreds? For heaven's sake."
"In-Instructor, heal gently. Kunta hurts a lot."
"Quit the dramatics."
He wound the bandages around the boy in a rough wrap and soaked them until the potion bled through the cloth. Only then did Kunta's face ease.
They were not wounds a little treatment could simply erase. Even so, he was a barbarian of a mystery-race, and true to a people born with monstrous gifts of the body, he recovered fast.
"Better now?"
"Kunta is fine. But must return to Arno and Bear-Girl quickly. Those two are in danger."
"...First, tell me exactly what happened."
"The kids are in danger right now. All of them, caught. And those bastards said if Kunta does not bring Instructor, they will do terrible things to those two!"
"Those bastards?"
"Strange men. Pupils were strange. Skin was strange too. Most of all, incredibly strong!"
Lee Han had a fairly good idea who the men Kunta meant were.
Half-Fiends?
The traits the boy had picked out matched them well enough: men who had seized a Demon Person's power through a special pill made from monster flesh. Lee Han's face hardened all at once. Even so, something felt wrong.
Namely—
"The Sword Duke?"
"Don't know. At least when those men threatened Kunta, Sword Duke was nowhere."
"...What is that woman doing?"
He could not make it sit right. A great Superhuman like the Sword Duke was there, and still Half-Fiends had run wild, seized Arno, and used him to threaten Kunta. She might be short on humanity, but that strength of hers did not simply vanish.
Then, abruptly—
"What about Iliad? What happened to that man?"
"Hm? Arno's dad? Don't know. Di-didn't see... him?"
Smack!
Lee Han struck his own brow before he knew it. One ominous supposition had flashed through his mind.
They went after that woman's only weakness?
If—only if—those bastards had taken that monstrous bloodline hostage, then...
"Haah. Crazy bastards. They looking to drag everyone down with them?"
Not the Half-Fiends. The cultist lunatics behind them. Lee Han felt, all over again, that they were truly insane. Things had seemed quiet for a while, and then they pulled a stunt like this.
"Worse than animals..."
He was furious.
Offen being attacked? He didn't particularly care. They had known one another for barely more than a fortnight. Attacked or not, what was it to him?
...The people being held there were different.
Levi, who had been training for a short while with House Offen, and Arno and Kunta, who had been helping her. Those three were his disciples. His people. And the fact that someone had laid hands on them sent irritation and disgust surging until the veins stood out between his brows.
"In-Instructor..."
"...Instructor is scarier..."
The pressure pouring off him weighed the air down in an instant and crushed the ground beneath it.
"Which bastards? The ones who did this to you."
"..."
"Those ones die. No exceptions."
"Instructor..."
Lee Han was remembering Kunta hurt and bleeding, and Kunta, as if moved by it, spoke in a trembling voice.
"Th-this wound is from rolling off a cliff. Kunta took a shortcut in a hurry. Ku-Kunta was not actually attacked."
"..."
"S-still, thank you, Instructor, for getting angry instead of Kunta. The cliff Kunta fell from—Kunta can tell you where?"
"..."
"Instructor?"
"...Bow."
"??"
"Put your head on the ground, you brat!"
"...Kunta is a patient, though?"
"And?"
"...How should Kunta bow."
A barbarian might have no sense for a room, but he grew one quickly.
...By force.
Meanwhile, the Offen estate lay silent.
If Kunta was to be believed, a battle ought to have been on the verge of breaking out, yet the quiet was so unnatural it grated. The stillness before a storm. A vile, murderous hush in which a fight might erupt at any moment.
And in that hush—
"Sir Ali. Sir Mohan. I didn't think the two of you would fall this far."
Arno glared at the men encircling them, his eyes burning with a wolf's ferocity.
"Heh heh. You still honor us with 'sir'?"
"Proof that you remain composed even now. Heh heh. Admirable. When I was your age, young master, I was nothing but a greenhorn who feared neither fire nor water, and yet you govern your feelings so well. The makings of a fine swordsman, without question. Truly, House Offen's good fortune."
Creak.
The moment something like praise for House Offen left their mouths, Arno ground his teeth without meaning to.
Ali and Mohan. They were the captain and vice-captain of House Offen's hunting unit, men who ordinarily stayed out of the estate and held the monsters back in the dangerous reaches of the forest. Their skill sat at the level of Offen's master-instructors—upper knights—and they were scions of retainer houses that had stood with the family for long years. Loyal men. Fine swordsmen, he had believed. And yet, of all things...
"Why lay hands on something so wicked? Why throw in with heretics..."
Ali and Mohan were grotesque to look at. Their eyes had bleached white, as if albinism had taken them, and knobby protrusions had risen across their skin. They looked less like men who had stepped out of humanity than like monsters, and it was plain they had taken a monster's power into themselves.
There was no mistaking the phenomenon.
Arno knew that once demon-humanization advanced, it could not be undone. What showed on his face was not only rage, but pity—pity that swordsmen who had given their lives to the sword had crossed a river from which there was no return, and fallen.
"...Are you pitying us? Even now?"
"The young master is as soft as ever. Well, the family head was never a particularly strict man."
"..."
"Young master?"
Arno held his silence. He looked as though he had no further wish to mix words with them. Instead—
"I'm sorry, my lady. To show you my house in such a shameful state, and in front of a guest."
"No, I'm all right. I came because I wanted to train at Offen, so isn't this something I brought on myself? More to the point, are you all right, Lord Arno? It seems the swordsmen of your own house have turned on you..."
"You're worrying over someone else, even now?"
"It isn't even all that dangerous, is it? We've only been locked up. This much... well, it happened to me often enough when I belonged to House Folt. Heh."
"...I-I'm sorry."
Afraid he had brushed a dark past, Arno apologized at once. The girl who received it even laughed, softly, as if the whole matter already lay behind her.
"It's in the past. I don't expect I'll ever see them again in this life. More importantly, who started this? From the look of things a heretical order is mixed in—the kind the ugly rumors have been circling lately—but I don't think that's all there is."
"Neither do I. Most likely someone high in the house joined hands with the heretics and plotted to seize the family."
"Do you have someone in mind?"
"I do."
"Y-young master? We are standing right here, you know...?"
Two Half-Fiends stood practically under their noses, and the pair went on voicing their guesses as if the men were not there at all.
It was not that they were fearless. Their captors had only imprisoned them, with no visible intent to threaten or harm, and that was what let them act so brazenly.
"So long as Grandmother is here, they cannot attack us. They will want to avoid the Sword Duke's wrath as well."
"Won't she already be very angry?"
"Which is why they are staking their lives on it, isn't it? And... if it is that man, he will not hesitate to put his life on the table. He is nothing but a senile cockroach with little time left anyway."
"Oh..."
Levi's mouth drew in before she knew it. She had never heard Arno's diction turn so rough.
Of course—
"Who is this cockroach?"
She had the kindness to meet a classmate's anger where it stood, and she played along willingly. Arno answered with a short, scornful breath.
"There is one. A swordsman ought to pursue the sword, and yet a filthy man still wants nothing but games of power. ...Isn't that right, Great-Uncle—?"
Boom!
He flung the question at the closed door like a provocation, and as if in answer the door flew open all at once.
What came through—
"...Insolent wretch. A greenhorn with the blood still wet on his head, and you dare provoke me."
An old man thick with stubbornness shifted his feet at a slow pace. Watching him, Arno wore a sneer. Just as he had thought. It would be that old man.
"Allow me to introduce him, my lady. To my shame, this is Gardin de Offen—adopted son of my great-grandfather, the man who was so obviously meant to lead House Offen in Grandmother's place. As for what he is to our house—"
"...you may regard him as a lingering ghost."
It was as rough an appraisal as Arno had ever given.
Thud!
The old man stamped his staff hard against the floor. From a body that looked like nothing but joints, a strength no one could have imagined burst out for an instant, and he glared at Arno.
"Stop running that impudent mouth, you greenhorn with the blood still wet on your head."
"If the blood on your head dries, you die. Kindly spare us the ignorant talk, Great-Uncle."
"Your tongue has grown venomous. You used to be a boy who at least knew his manners."
"Manners are something you keep for people worth keeping them for, aren't they? More than that, the man teaching me said courtesy is only owed to those who deserve it. He said there is no need to be gentle with someone who isn't worth it."
"Ha! A teaching that hurries a man toward his grave. There are times when one must bend in order to live."
"That isn't a swordsman's logic. That's a politician's. How long do you mean to keep playing at politics, Great-Uncle?"
They were only quarreling with words, and yet it felt as if sparks were flying between them. To bear the name Offen was to share blood, and still the two of them seemed worse than strangers.
"Gardin... ah. Could he be the one who once rose as far as the Kingdom's Hundred Swordsmen...?"
Gardin. A collateral son, adopted into House Offen in place of Felicia after her lack of talent was declared in childhood—and yet a swordsman so famed as a genius that the word collateral rang hollow. At only thirty he had climbed to master-instructor, the highest post in the house, and had Felicia never returned to the kingdom, its head would surely have been him.
"All of that is nothing but the past, my lady. Now he is only a cockroach that will not die and will not stay dead."
"Then see for yourself whether that fame is past or not!"
Whoosh!
The pressure bursting from Gardin was no ordinary thing. The room was sealed on every side, and still it felt as if a blade-wind were blowing through it, harsh enough to sting the skin—as if to prove that the name of one among the hundred swordsmen who represented the kingdom had not been empty.
"Ha. Next to Instructor, this is a breeze."
Even so, Arno was not afraid. The man before him was plainly the greater fighter, but ever since entering the Academy he had felt, every single day, a spirit far more savage and far stronger than this ill-bred display.
And so—
"If Grandmother spared you, you should have lived quietly in some back room. Why crawl out again and make a disaster of things?"
He did not hold back, and a strange light entered Gardin's eyes. Better than expected, that light seemed to say.
"Not bad. Talent so fine I can hardly believe you are that wench Felicia's blood. Tch. Then again, she was a woman with unusually good fortune in people."
When Gardin spoke Felicia's name, he was grinding his teeth. Hatred shown without concealment, and somewhere in it even contempt and loathing.
"...You ask why I crawled back into the world when I might have rotted in a back room? Is it not obvious? The chance to take my place back has finally come. There is no stupidity greater than letting it slip."
"And where, exactly, is this place of yours?"
"Nonsense!"
Thud.
"This place was mine to begin with."
"..."
...There was no obsession like it. To think that even past ninety he could still burn with hunger for power.
They say power is a drug you cannot put down until you die. An accurate saying.
Arno was sick of him to the bone. Decades had passed, and the old man still could not abandon power. In the end he had joined hands with heretics and turned the house's own people into Demon People. That was what sickened him all over again.
How vile. Could a person give off a stench of rot this foul?
"...You picked the wrong opponent."
"Ha! You mean that wench Felicia? Yes, of course she is frightening. There is no one in this world who does not fear an Aura User. But that woman cannot move right now. How could a girl locked inside a prison of her own making ever move!"
"..."
"Of course, someday even she will have to choose. But I know her. How indecisive that damned wench is about anything that is not the sword. Merely choosing will take her years, easily. And years are time enough to change a great many things."
Gardin was confident. His tone was that of a man certain the calamity called an Aura User could not move for the time being, and he even wore a sneer. Just imagining despair settling over that foolish woman's face was enough to send joy surging—
"—The opponent I meant is not Grandmother."
"...What?"
"Grandmother, at least, knows how to hold back. If you expect anything like restraint from him, you shouldn't."
"?"
"He is, how should I put it, less a warrior than..."
Rrrrrumble!!
"...Yes. A man like this."
"???"
A tremendous vibration rose without warning. The estate shook as if an earthquake had struck.
And in the next instant—
BOOOOM—!
A roar like a falling meteor crashed over the house. The building split halfway open, and the ground heaved. Bodies flipped. People went down, and down again, and only a handful kept their feet.
Even those who kept their feet were not safe.
Because—
A bellow fit to burst eardrums rolled over the estate—no, over the entire domain.
"..."
"I told you. You picked the wrong one."
"..."
"For the record, once he gets like that, we can't stop him either. So..."
He let out a soft breath.
Arno offered the wraith a rite for the dead before the man was even gone, a thoroughly satisfied smile on his face.