A Knight Speaks No Falsehood (4)
Back when he was barely five, and his father had set him up on his shoulders, he seemed to have said something of the sort.
"Father, I want to be a hero like Mother!"
Looking back on it now, he had been a child without sense. He ought to have said he wanted to become a man like his father. Instead, with no tact at all, he had said he wanted to become like his mother.
But he had been young then, and he never saw the bitter smile on his father's face.
"Is that so? A fine goal, that."
Even so, his father had affirmed the thoughtless boy.
"Hehe!"
He thought he had been glad of those affirming words. Those days, when he was still pure, and still full of dreams. He had certainly set her as the mark he meant to reach.
"Hm. Does our boy like your mother that much?"
"Yes!"
"Haha. Well, she is someone who shines. But remember, son. Chase a light too hard, and the heart suffers for it."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll understand when you're grown. Someday."
...Yes. I understand now, Father.
You were afraid I would end up like this. You really were a wise man.
A father's teaching, understood only once he had reached this age. He recalled the past with the bright, unclouded smile of a grown man remembering a child's heart, and hummed under his breath.
You knew. That I might be ruined, if things went wrong. This talent for creation, this talent for figures—both of them blessings I took from you, it seems. Thank you, Father.
Offering up his gratitude and his respect for the father who had died long ago, he lifted his face high toward the sky and opened his mouth.
"Do you remember, Mother? Father truly loved days like this. Days when the sky is clear, and the stars and the moonlight stand out sharp."
"......"
"Haha. Will you not even give me an answer?"
"...My son does not smile like that."
"You had the wit to notice a difference like that? Now that is news to me. Haha!"
"Insolent...!"
Steel whispered. Felicia's anger rose, and she had only gathered her momentum, yet the killing edge of a cold blade tore the air around them to shreds.
It seemed she might cut down everything in the very next instant. This was nothing less than the dreadful wrath of a Sword Duke. And yet—!
"—You still can't hide what you feel. This rejuvenation. The side effects really are severe."
"...!"
He saw through it at a glance. The fury Felicia was pouring out was a disguise.
"A fatal flaw, for a swordswoman."
Let it be said plainly. For a Superhuman, rejuvenation was no blessing. It was a misfortune.
The reason?
"Your will is shaking, isn't it. The maturity that belongs to your years is gone, and the sight is truly ugly. —Mother."
"You bastard!"
Felicia flew into a rage and drew swords beyond counting.
Dozens of blades—no, hundreds—shot high into the sky at the dictate of her will, moving for all the world like a rain of meteors, and then—
They poured straight down.
In that dizzying instant, with his life hanging by a thread, the man swung. Languidly. As if the sword were only drifting in his hand.
But in the next moment, the sword the man unfolded—the sword Iliad unfolded—
"As expected. A feeble sword, nothing like Mother's."
A clean shear, and he cut the meteor shower apart.
Putting down the swordsmen who had risen in revolt was easy.
Steel clattered to the ground.
"I surrender."
Most of them yielded quickly. Plenty had watched Gardin, the heart of the rebellion, surrender without so much as drawing his sword, and they had seen Lee Han's strength overwhelm even the vampires of legend. Their will to fight collapsed on the spot.
What followed was simple. The swordsmen of Offen who had been locked away were set free, and they subdued the Half-Fiends or turned the cells back on them, while others volunteered themselves into pursuit parties to run down the ones who fled. The affair was being cleared away at speed. It would not have been too much to say the matter was finished. And yet...
"Any guess where those two have got to?"
However Offen chose to run itself was no great concern of his. He was only asking where the rotting monster and the fairy-tale writer had gone off to amuse themselves.
"Mm..."
Arno turned the question over for a moment, casting about for a likely place. The masters of the house were still missing, even after an uproar of this size. No presence could be felt anywhere, so it was reasonable to guess they were nowhere near. And yet...
"...They will be nearby."
"Nearby?"
"Yes. I expect they may be in the Monster Forest."
"There wasn't a soul there."
He was the very man who had come in by way of the sky over the Monster Forest. He had not felt the Sword Duke's presence in the slightest, which was why the claim made him tilt his head.
"Space Concealment."
Lee Han's face asked the question for him.
"The name sounds grand, but in truth it is something like a barrier made with Aura. One spreads Aura in every direction and hides all of one's presence and power. Grandmother said it is a useful art. Through it, one conceals one's own existence, and no matter what technique one uses, it never touches the surroundings, so the harm one does can be kept to a minimum."
"Right..."
Lee Han accepted the thing on those two points: power concealed, and the damage around it cut down. Certainly, if someone on the order of an Aura User ran wild as they pleased, the nuisance would be a nuisance with no equal. It would not be strange for an art like that to exist.
"So that woman went and hid on purpose. That what you're saying?"
"Th-that is how it can be seen, yes."
Arno was plainly thrown, hearing his grandmother called that woman, but Lee Han had no mind to spare for the way he was speaking. And for good reason.
Could this be that?
...I-I don't really know either.
You've got a feeling, though.
Mmm...
Lee Han and Derek held a whole conversation by eye contact alone, an astonishing little talent. Not because the two of them were close. It was possible only because their thoughts met at a single point.
Derek had said it. That Iliad was a man who should have died.
Take those words as fact and look at what lay in front of them, and it was only natural that a thick foreboding should come welling up.
...First, we find them. Fast.
If only to put out the anxious look in his student's eyes.
Just as that thin anxiety was gathering—
"Instructor, Kunta speaks!"
"You've got something to say, that it?"
"Correct!"
The strong pair of hands that had been helping the household clear the wreckage—no, the barbarian exchange student—came running up out of nowhere and announced that he had something to say. Lee Han glanced over to see what it would be, and Kunta pointed toward the forest.
"Since a while ago, strange thing felt from there. Kunta is scared."
"There?"
"Body trembled, that much. Kunta feels a presence like the White-Feathered Serpent Kunta saw as a child."
"...So that's what you mean."
Someone else might have heard only nonsense they couldn't parse. He was not so foolish a man, nor so careless a teacher, that he would fail to catch the meaning of a student he had kept company with for nearly a year.
The White-Feathered Serpent, above all, had to be the land-god worshipped as a god by the barbarian tribe that lived in the forest of mystery, far beyond the reach of civilization. Something akin to the Black King of the North. Judged by presence alone, then, the serpent was a transcendent existence fit to stand beside an Aura User, and Kunta's claim of feeling something similar carried weight.
One might ask how he could sense what even Lee Han could not.
A mystery-race isn't called a mystery-race for nothing.
A mystery-race. Those who carried a mystery no ordinary human could dare to understand. However keen his own five senses, theirs were driven by a power without precedent, one he would never catch.
And so.
"...Think you can play guide?"
"Kunta was the best guide in our family."
Lee Han was not ashamed in the least of leaning on his student. He showed the trust outright, and he did not hold any of it back.
"Heh heh! Kunta is helpful!"
A student perking up under a master's trust, offered plain and unadorned, was only natural.
"This way!"
Kunta had to be walking this forest for the first time, and still he chose each path without a moment's hesitation, as if it were his own room. He was guiding by instinct and nothing else. A professional guide, set in front of the sight, would have spat that the man had made up his mind to die. This was no ordinary ground. He was barging straight through a forest crawling with monsters.
Lee Han followed him exactly as he had from the start, without a single complaint.
If anything displeased him—
"Why are you lot following?"
—was the trouble the students strung out behind him like ducklings?
"It is my family's affair, is it not?"
"We ought to at least run an errand for Master."
"Might we not be of some help? A healing skill—no, medical knowledge might be needed..."
"...Busybodies. Honestly."
From what he had heard in the faculty meetings, students were brats who never listened worth a damn, cheeky things who ranked a teacher lower than a dog one happened to be raising, and there were more of them than anyone could count. But our kids, really...
Being too diligent is a problem too.
Who would ever have thought children could make trouble by being too good, and too sincere?
They're so admirable I can't even tell them to turn back.
They were showing a set, stubborn resolve to lend even one hand, and Lee Han could not make himself into a bad enough man to say, flatly, that they would be no help and ought to go home. He was barely keeping a bitter smile off his face, and only for a moment.
"Here, Instructor!"
"...Here?"
"Yes. Here."
"......"
"I-it really is..."
"I wasn't quiet because I doubted you."
To say it again: Lee Han trusted Kunta. More precisely, he trusted the ability. What lay in front of his eyes now was nothing but the most ordinary brush, without a single thing out of place, and yet—
He studied the forest without letting up, and for one instant—
A chill went through him.
"—All of you, get behind me."
"Yes?"
"Now."
"O-okay! K-Kunta, sir, this way!"
Lee Han barked it and put his students at his back. If this was only a gut feeling, well and good. If it was not, then what waited ahead...
The air cracked.
"!!?"
Before the thought could finish, the forest warped without warning, and Lee Han swung in desperate haste.
Plum blossoms unfurled and drew around him and his students, closing like buds before the bloom.
The moment that bud was complete, a rain of blades pierced the forest and came down over them, and over the bud itself.
For an instant Lee Han's head spun. A tremendous impact crashed over him, and even with the Plum-Blossom Sword holding it off, his skin burned.
It hurts even though I blocked it?!
The shock rattled him, but as if to sneer that he had no time even for that, little by little—
The barrier crackled. The Plum-Blossom Sword was pierced, and the instant Lee Han saw his shield coming apart, he raised what came next.
A mass of sword-force, heavy with ruinous power, did more than cancel the blade-rain. It erased the rain entirely.
And in the next moment, when everything had been swept away...
A breath of air.
"—Ah. Instructor, is it not? What are you doing in a place like this?"
"......"
He stood in front of Lee Han.
"My, my. Were you not startled? I very nearly cut the Instructor down as well, did I not?"
"......"
"Still, what a relief. Your skill truly is remarkable, as expected. However carelessly I swung, to think you would block this."
"......"
"Ah, I ought to apologize first. Forgive me for swinging at you again—"
The blade moved.
"......You seem quite angry."
"...Not really."
Lee Han had swung without a shred of hesitation, and the man failed to take the whole of the blow. Blood ran from his cheek. Even seeing that, Lee Han felt not the slightest apology.
And for good reason.
"Ah, Father...?"
A hand seized hold.
"...Derek?"
"D-don't come closer. Arno. Th-that person.... He isn't your father."
"What...?!"
"The skin is your father's, yes, but the inside isn't your father anymore. That thing is......"
Derek swallowed.
The hide was the father's. What stood inside it was not.