A Knight Speaks No Falsehood (6)
"—An axe?"
Iliad tilted his head. His opponent had, out of nowhere, flung his sword to the ground and taken up an axe instead, and the sight was baffling beyond measure.
"Why? Is an axe a joke to you?"
"...Not a joke, no. But surely it is hardly a weapon a knight ought to carry?"
"So you are looking down on it."
In Pendragon, the axe was not a weapon in common use. Knights thought it looked too crude to be seen with—not out of any hatred for woodcutters, but because that was simply how the world regarded an axe. Bandits and mercenaries were the ones who favored it, and the heights one could climb with an axe were limited. To make one a primary weapon was as good as a knight declaring, My talent is so paltry that I shall content myself with a simple arm! No one cursed a man to his face for wielding one. Even so, a broad current of contempt ran underneath, and the truth was that an axe never stood in the light.
And yet the man before him was no ordinary fighter. He had reached a considerable realm, and still he had drawn an axe. Iliad could not hide his disappointment.
"How disappointing. A swordsman is bound to see the match through with the sword to the very end. How can you bring out an axe?"
"Be disappointed or don't. I was never the type to fuss over weapons, and I'm no swordsman."
"...There is no reasoning with you."
Steel whispered free of the sheath.
"See that you do not regret it."
Perhaps because disappointment had come down on him without mercy, the smile left Iliad's face, and his blade flashed. It was a sword art that, together with the Willow Sword, could well be said to have seated him upon the title of Sword Saint in his twenties.
"It is called Light Sword."
A new school, conceived in his teens and completed in his twenties—sunlight made into a blade.
The Light Sword school. A new lineage of swordsmanship Iliad had conceived in his teens and at last perfected in his twenties. Sword Qi spread as if it were the most natural thing in the world, flooding outward and expanding without pause. The art had begun in a sudden glimpse of sunlight, and now, with the sun named Iliad at its center, Sword Qi devoured the space around him without mercy and unfurled a numberless host of blades in a single instant.
A clean shearing. Everything within a kilometer of Iliad was cut—trees, rock, hills, all of it, without exception. Even if an iron wall had barred the way, that keen Sword Qi would have brought its terrible edge to bear and sheared through iron as well.
A heavy impact landed.
...That was how it ought to have been.
"—Grand name. Doesn't seem to have much behind it."
"—!"
In the next instant the radiant heart of that Sword Qi shattered against the axe like glass. It should never have broken so easily—! But whether he was rattled or not—
"That's one."
A brutal crack. Lee Han's axe slammed squarely into Iliad's jaw.
"Ghk—?!"
The onlookers groaned before they knew they had. They had not been struck themselves, yet the moment a sound no jaw ought to make rose from Iliad's, they flinched and squeezed their eyes shut.
As for Felicia—
"Ah...!"
At the sight of her son being beaten, tears welled, and she bared all the backbone of a sunfish—which is to say, almost none. Her hands trembled. Even so, she could not bring herself to step in.
"Ah!"
...Her grandson had clenched his fists tight, face bright with delight, and because of that she simply could not move.
I-is this really right?
It felt, somehow, as if she were watching a scene of outright unfilial betrayal. Felicia could not hide her sour displeasure and swallowed a groan, but she tried to take the sight in a better light.
If it goes like this, Iliad really will come back, won't he?
It was only a small faith that this was the process of curing her son. And so—
"H-hold on... just hold on."
Felicia had to offer her encouragement with a face on the verge of tears.
Lee Han genuinely wanted to ask. Wind tore past him. On what nerve do you look down on an axe? The next blow detonated.
"Krgh!?"
All so he could be humiliated like this.
"You blocked the sword easy enough. Why's the axe such a strain?"
"What manner of—!"
"Asking why I'm so good with an axe? Obvious."
"This was my living, dumbass."
In his mercenary days he had taken side work on construction sites. As a soldier he had swung an axe to raise palisades and build camps. Even after he became a knight, the veteran hand in the earthworks trade—the one earning his keep—was none other than him. More than ten years of nothing but axe-work. Of course the way had opened. And not once, in a single swing, had he ever been careless.
With an axe, the one blow is everything.
Yes. An axe was, without question, the sort of weapon a bandit or a mercenary would carry. But the reason they made it their main arm was that the weapon itself was ferociously strong, and it took monstrous power easily—power enough to smash even a sword. In that sense, he and the art of the axe were an excellent match.
Muscle creaked and surged. The muscles of Lee Han's back writhed as if they meant to rise. He poured a body trained to its limit into nothing but destruction and loaded that force into the axe. His single strike was simple, and because it was simple, the power it gave off was nothing short of terrifying.
If the Black Lion of the North had been born to the Strength to Overturn Mountains, then Lee Han's strength was another kind of greatness: the great force of the old man who moved the mountain. At the end of a lifetime of effort and obsession, just as a man may at last shift a mountain, he had gathered, step by patient step, a strength vast enough to lift one.
Unleashing Great Strength
It had no particular name. But if there were such a thing as a king of the greenwood bandits, then it was only right that he should be able to bring forth strength of this order—and that philosophy of Lee Han's was soaked into the axe as it came crashing down.
"!!?"
So what if there existed a technique that nullified every other art?
Then I just keep bringing it down until you split!
Crash. Boom. A roaring chain of impacts.
Lee Han's axe-work did not stop. Whether his opponent blocked or attacked, whether a blade grazed his body, he paid it no mind. He simply struck, mechanical and relentless, and struck again. Skin split. Blood sprayed. A gout of it surged up at last, and he ignored even that.
And so, at the end of it—
Bone gave with a sickening crack.
"Kehuk...!"
His opponent broke first. The twenty-ninth blow had snapped the man's wrist and ankle at the same time.
"Was that about thirty? No. Twenty-nine..."
"Y-you madman! Wh-what in the world is that body made of?! I cut you that many times—why are there nothing but scratches?!"
"You're hardly one to talk."
So this was why a Demon Person was such a miserable thing to fight. The body was filthily tough, and hard. The recovery was considerable, too. Beat it, break it, and it knit itself back together all the same.
"Wow. So this is what talent actually looks like. You slip or dodge almost everything?"
"M-mockery has its limits!"
"No, I'm not mocking you. I mean it."
"Hah...?"
Iliad's expression collapsed. It had already been crumbling, but to see it fall apart this openly was something new.
All at once—
"Even if I evade, even if I block, even if I take it apart, there is a crudeness that cannot be stopped.... What kind of—!"
"Crude? That's harsh—no, wait. You're right. It is crude. Damn right it is!"
"......"
Lee Han admitted it without a fight, and gladly took the insult as praise.
"If I can beat the hell out of the world's finest, then crude is just fine."
No matter how exceptional the man across from him, no matter how hard that man came at him, he would hit until the other fell, and then hit again. How refreshingly plain a tactic was that?
"If ten blows won't drop a great tree, then a hundred.... No. A thousand times, ten thousand—you just keep at it until it falls."
That was why he had built his stamina. That was why he had raised his strength: to beat men like that into the ground. So even if people cursed him for being crude, Lee Han did not feel bad about it. Not because he was some pervert who took a thrill in being insulted.
"Watching bastards far better than me come apart is just that satisfying."
It meant his effort had not been meaningless, and that was a happy thing.
"He's insane..."
Iliad admitted it. The knight called Lee Han was madder than he had imagined, and far more dangerous. Which meant—
"Can you break this as well—?"
Should he not go mad himself?
A joint popped.
"...?"
"You would do well to be careful. From here on, even I have resolved myself to death."
Pop. Creak. Iliad dislocated his own joints on purpose, the better to use his arms like whips. It was a means of making an already blinding, close-range Sword Qi faster still. Because of it, a Sword Qi that had already covered a vast reach grew vaster, and came pouring down more viciously than before.
"White Night."
Even the night shall be lit, for the pale twilight will brighten the world.
At last Iliad's Sword Qi erupted, as if to illuminate the world itself. Light burst outward in a blinding bloom. The Sword Qi of a moment ago looked like a toy beside it. Spears of radiance exploded until they threatened to blind anyone who looked, and the speed that followed was so tremendous a man might not even realize his throat had been cut in the next instant.
Nor was it merely fast. With a piercing shriek of impact it showed an overwhelming power to punch through, drilling everything in sight, until even space itself warped. Blocking was impossible. If Lee Han tried to smash through it or endure it as he had a moment before, it would not have been strange for him to die. Thousands upon tens of thousands of thrusts sought his throat all at once.
Before a sight so unreasonable it seemed to declare that effort could never surpass talent—a sight that raised the hair on the neck—Lee Han spoke.
"......Still worse than an arrow rain."
With that disappointed appraisal, he hit the dirt and rolled with all the vigor of a lazy donkey.
Lee Han did not look at a thing like this and call it unreasonable.
War is more unreasonable.
In his previous life he had, without meaning to, been sent into a country tearing itself apart in civil war, and in this life he had, again without meaning to, spent three years rolling through battlefields. Was this more dangerous than the machine-gun bursts, the mines, the Claymores, and the snipers of modern war? No. Was it more savage than the storms of arrows and the charges of armies tens of thousands strong that he had watched across those three years? No.
Having survived situations that savage and that unreasonable, Lee Han could say it plainly.
No matter the crisis, if you don't freeze, and you keep thrashing, you live.
He did not ponder long. He crawled across the ground as if swimming through it, and he did not hesitate to roll—and he did it in a manner that the fairy-tale gentleman, still playing the noble knight even while a Heart Demon ate him, had never once imagined.
"Have you ever seen so base a man!!"
Base. Yes. Nobles who held honor as dear as life would sooner die than commit the wretched act of rolling and crawling across the ground. Better dead than that.
Self-righteous orthodox bastards, the lot of them.
Inwardly he spat a curse he personally ranked even higher than calling a man something lower than a beast, and a sneer touched his mouth. Yes. His own figure was certainly an eyesore. The low crawl, and the prone advance. It was not the bearing of a knight. It was the method of a mercenary or a soldier, the cowardly flailing of a man who wanted to live.
However.
If I can look myself in the eye, that's enough!
More to the point, fuss over nobility alone, and—a grinding crunch—this was the sort of thing that happened.
"Got you."
"...!"
Lee Han took the space at his opponent's back and hurled the axe as he was. Iliad reacted at once and moved to attack, but—
"I was faster."
A low thrum. The thrown axe resonated with Lee Han's energy, rang with an ominous harmony, and flushed red, the way a furnace gathers heat little by little...!
"—A Claymore. No. Ever heard of the burst version of Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand?"
Burst Version — the axe no longer knew friend from foe.
The axe became a bomb that did not distinguish friend from foe, and it blew apart.