A Knight Speaks No Lie (7)
Did you know?
Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand had, in truth, been the secret ultimate art of the Beggar Sect's chief. Older than the Tang Clan's version—the original, in other words. A fact most people who read martial tales these days had never heard.
He hadn't gone looking for it, either. It was simply—
"Han. The Tang Clan's got no roots. None!"
Useless trivia, and nothing more, picked up because Dokgo—his brother in all but blood—had always been dead serious about murim novels.
...I'm thinking every stray thought there is.
Clearly he wasn't in his right mind. Here he was, nitpicking nonsense in the middle of this. Well. He had just set off a blast that amounted to you die, I die.
"I really am a madman..."
A thin, muffled ringing filled his ears. Lee Han didn't even think to clutch at them. He shoved himself up off the ground and cursed himself as he rose. Offering the axe as a sacrifice and detonating that mass of sword-force had been all well and good. He simply hadn't spared a thought for what came after. Anyone could see it was the sort of thing only a lunatic would do.
Even so.
I didn't die, and it worked. That's a profit, isn't it?
"Aaaaaagh—!"
Lee Han looked down at Iliad writhing on the ground and let out a short, breathy laugh.
Laying it on a bit thick, aren't you.
Honestly, he'd been lucky.
This man's swordsmanship really is absurd.
He would grant the sword, and the talent. Light Sword, White Night—the naming sense was a little childish, but unlike the names, the power was the genuine article.
And yet.
He doesn't have the nerve.
More precisely, he wore every sign of a man long gone from the field. His leg had been ruined something over ten years ago, so it was only natural if it was natural at all. The talent might remain what it had always been.
Which is why a blunt, stupid tactic like this catches him.
His ability to adapt was laughably slow. How fatal that was in a real fight hardly needed saying aloud.
Even so, not a shred of a victor's satisfaction showed on Lee Han's face. And no wonder.
"Grrrr—!"
"...Seriously. He's not even a damn dog."
Nothing was over yet. Had the opponent been an ordinary man, it would have ended here. Unfortunately, he was no ordinary man. He was a demon-person.
A beast's cry ground out of the fallen Iliad's mouth, making a mockery of the fact that he had still been able to speak a moment ago. It was not imitation. His humanity was truly disappearing.
"I-Instructor! Y-you have to finish this, fast! If the demon-humanization completes, there's really no saving him!"
...I know without you telling me, you brat.
Taechang didn't have to shout. Lee Han already knew how troublesome this was.
Demon-humanization was broadly divided into three stages. The first, a change in personality. The second, the urge to kill. The third...
The loss of humanity.
Unlike only moments ago, when conversation had still been possible, this was the stage in which a man forgot both the intelligence and the feeling of being human, as if he had become a monster outright. To reach it was, in practice, to cross a river from which there was no return.
"Kahaaahk!"
Iliad heaved like a beast, and his body began, slowly, to recover. The burns and wounds left by the blast, the ruined joints—all of it regenerated with the speed of a lizard regrowing its tail.
That was bad.
The end of a demon-person, in the end, is...
life force burning out, and death. Forcing the body to recover like that only hastened the drain. It was suicide.
Iliad's body shot upward.
"Kahaaahk!"
Even as he turned into a beast, he seemed to remember only the man who had driven him this far, and he bared a vast hostility toward Lee Han.
Even so.
"...You're still not letting go of the sword? That's disgusting. Seriously."
Blood didn't merely run from Iliad's hand. It looked ready to burst as he clamped the hilt, and the blade flashed. A pale arc tore the air.
From the moment a man fell into a beast, he ought to have been incapable of anything like swordsmanship. Unfortunately, human beings were creatures who learned not with the head, but with the body.
The sword sank into Lee Han's side.
"...Wow. The crazier this guy gets, the stronger he gets."
The slender blade danced, following nothing but instinct and what the body remembered.
It was a strange thing to say, but the sword Iliad swung with his reason gone was more beautiful than it had ever been.
That much so.
"Perfect..."
Felicia murmured it before she knew she had.
He was her son, falling into corruption, and yet the sword that son unfolded was tremendous. He had lost his reason and forgotten even his swordsmanship, swinging by instinct alone—and there, more perfect than at any moment before, stood a swordsman.
Yes. That was it.
Long ago, the sword with which Iliad had carved a bronze statue. One day, as if heaven itself had granted him a revelation, her son had shaved that statue down with an ordinary blade alone, using neither Sword Resonance nor Sword Qi—a sword of enlightenment. But before he could complete that sword, Iliad had broken.
The irony of it. Fifteen years had to pass before she saw that sword again.
A completion of the sword that Felicia's talent could never reach. Watching her son walk toward that completion, she—
I really am a wretched mother.
Even in a moment like this, she found herself marveling at the son advancing toward the sword's completion, rather than worrying for him. How selfish a human being was that? How filthy?
I... in the end I have nothing but grounds for disqualification. As a mother, and as a human being...
Felicia could not hide her devastation.
"Kaaaahk!"
She saw her son swinging a sword like a beast.
"...Tuh!"
She saw a brave boy slip that sword by a hair and still have his skin opened, blood streaming down him without mercy.
"M-Master's Diamond Body, that easily..."
"But the instructor is harder than iron!"
"Shouldn't we hand him a shield, even now?"
She was sorry.
Because of one thoroughly disqualified human being, her son had become that. A boy with no connection whatsoever to their family was bleeding, and her grandson, and that boy's disciples, were sick with anxiety. Everything seemed to be her fault.
Felicia—
"Stop. Stop it, Iliad, please..."
He jerked.
"This mother is sorry. I'll apologize, so please, just stop..."
She spoke to him on impulse, and he—who had surely lost his reason—reacted.
All at once Iliad's form shot toward Felicia. He came bearing a fury even fiercer than when he had charged Lee Han, and though she took in every instant of it as it happened, she assumed no stance at all. She showed not even the will to block, as if she meant only to receive her child's rage. To atone for her wrong. To—
"—Didn't I tell you not to step in? You butt in, and even the things that were about to work won't."
"What—?!"
"It was just about to become something. Don't interfere."
"......"
She was startled.
Not because he had suddenly blocked what was in front of her. Not because Iliad had taken a fist and been flung bodily away. None of that.
What startled her was—
This boy... don't tell me, right now...?
Felicia looked into his eyes, and in a flash she understood. Those were not the eyes of a man meeting a crisis. Nor did they show the slightest intention of protecting her. Here, in this urgent moment, with his own life in danger, he was—
T-training?
She realized he was using Iliad for his own advancement.
".........You madman."
Look who's talking.
Lee Han heard the curse and still did not turn his head. There was someone he still had to face. He only fixed himself on the opponent before his eyes.
But.
"You lot..."
"Yes?"
"You're worrying about me right now, aren't you."
"......"
"Sorry. For showing you something pathetic."
He apologized for what needed apologizing. Some instructor he was—a man who presumed to call himself their master—putting on a miserable display like this.
"Must look ridiculous, failing to put down one retired weakling."
"H-he was called a Sword Saint, you know? Unless you're an Aura User, there's no handling him..."
"Still just some man who's been retired for over ten years."
"......"
"So from here on, I'll show you. Enough that you can say you're proud of your master."
"...Instructor, your eyes have gone."
Lee Han didn't care what they said. He couldn't hold back the grin leaking out of him, and he smiled, bright as anything.
Ah. This is fun...
Wasn't today a truly lucky day?
I'm finally getting stabbed by it.
He remembered the bronze statue. The one he had seen the day he first visited the family, come to meet Felicia. That fantastic work, made by nothing but the pure art of the sword. So he had hoped. Hoped he might receive the sword of the man who had carved bronze.
Unfortunately, the swordsman who made the statue had retired past the point of being able to fight anyone at all, and Lee Han's anticipation had had to die in a hurry.
And then it showed up right in front of me, lucky as this.
He was glad of the unexpected fortune. This was no sword merely sheathed in Sword Qi or Sword River. Here was a sword carrying sword-intent—enlightenment, given a name and an edge. A sword that bored through his shoddy Diamond Body as if it were tofu.
And now...
How many times have I been cut?
Cut and stabbed again and again, blood pouring off him in sheets, Lee Han felt strangely dizzy—and yet his mind had never been clearer.
His senses were so sharp he could hear wild animals bolting in panic and the beat of birds' wings, and the smell of soil and sand soaked into the tip of his nose and cleared his head. His whole body was past sensitive. Everything was a stimulus. If it was now, Lee Han felt he could complete it.
"...Come."
"Kahaaahk!"
He goaded Iliad further—already furious at having his attack on Felicia interrupted—and the sword thrust for him.
Today, or perhaps in all of Iliad's life, the most perfect and most powerful sword he had ever drawn happened to unfold in this instant, and it rushed straight for Lee Han's heart.
That could not be dodged. Even the strongest shield in all the world would be pierced by it.
Every instant looked slow to Lee Han, like slow motion. The lantern-reel of a dying man. In that phenomenon where a whole life was said to play like film in a split second, he did not indulge the gloom of watching his past.
Intent is grit and belief!
He poured everything into letting his will seep into every last cell.
"......?"
"...Heh."
A few drops pattered to the ground.
It was a strange sight. The man who had driven a blade into a heart was the one thrown off, while the victim, wearing no armor at all, was smiling.
The sword that had broken against his chest crumpled in his bare hand.
Lee Han declared it as he did.
It was the realm the disciples of the Buddha longed to reach, and the dream of all who trained the external arts. Even after nirvana the flesh would not rot, hard as diamond, and because it could not be destroyed, people had given that state a name.
The single palm of an Adamant Monk who had achieved that indestructibility slammed into the swordsman's heart.