A Knight Speaks No Lie (8)
It looked, for all the world, like a scene cut from a play.
The timing was too perfect, the urgency too convincing. The whole thing unfolded so naturally that one could almost suspect the people on that ground were actors, performing.
Splurt—!
What followed was more than enough to drag them back into the real.
Iliad, the man they had called the Sword Saint, simply caved in. Blood burst from his mouth, and he folded the way a marionette does when every string is cut at once.
Thud.
He went down in a spill of dust. The silence that came after was absolute, and it arrived with a weight no shout could have matched.
"H-he's dead..."
The barbarian's voice. Of everyone there, he was the first to look the truth in the face and say it.
A fierce quiet closed over them.
No one spoke. Whether they had gone silent from the emptiness of death, from a reluctance to meet the family's eyes, or because grief had stopped the bereaved's own mouths, no one could have said. Only one thing was certain. It was not a hopeful silence.
And yet.
"...So this... this is how it ends."
"A splendid duel. Truly splendid."
Even with their own blood lying dead, they showed no sign of blaming the knight, nor of resenting him. They looked, if anything, like people who had already braced for this—who had known it would come, and were taking it with a cold, comparative calm.
Offen was a great house of the sword, a family of honorable knights. Kin might die, but if that death came of a fair duel, a knight's house did not condemn it. It accepted it. They might be called nobles, yet so long as they lived balanced on a blade, a knight's life was one that had already made its peace with death. So they swallowed their sorrow and showed no bitterness before Iliad's end. This had been a duel staked on knights' lives, and there had been no cowardice in it. There was nothing here that deserved to be called unfair.
Which meant the words they owed were thanks.
"Thank you. Thank you, child. You let that boy go as a knight, all the way to the end."
"Instructor, forgive us. We dragged you into a family matter and stained your hands red after all. Even so, we will not resent you. This is simply the life of those who stand upon the sword..."
Gratitude was the proper answer. Their own hearts had been too weak to do what needed doing, and he had done it in their place. They might owe him a debt. They would not answer that debt with something as cowardly as blame.
"Iliad... that child must have been satisfied."
"Yes. Surely..."
"—You were strong. Truly strong, Mother. I never imagined I would fight a duel I could leave without regret. Arno. You've found yourself a fine teacher."
"Yes, Father."
"Sending him to the Academy was the right choice."
"Haha. Still, I'm a little disappointed. If I were still on active duty, I could have fought even more handsomely than this."
"You were splendid enough already, so—...hm?"
"You were already magnificent, dear. Of course, had you still been active, the duel would have been finer still—...eh?"
"...Hm?"
All at once, the wrongness of it reached them.
What?
Why were they hearing a voice that had no business being heard?
The family blinked, faces gone slack with the thought that grief had finally invented a hallucination, and the whole Offen household tilted their heads in the same foolish, identical way—
"Having a grand time, aren't you."
The knight only snorted.
Whump.
Lee Han went down flat.
Every scrap of strength left him at once. He sprawled like a man crucified against the ground and dragged in air.
"A-are you all right?"
"...Give me a little rest and I'll be fine."
He said it. He did not believe he would be able to put force into his body for quite a while. He was that heavy, and the dizziness had come with it. He had lost a fair amount of blood, yes—but the real exhaustion was the cost of using Intent. Had he been anyone with a weaker mind, he would already have fainted. Or died.
In all honesty, what he wanted was to drop into a dead sleep.
"First, though, we finish treating that man. Then I can sleep or not. Whatever."
The moment the words left him, Felicia demanded an answer, her voice cracking with urgency.
"Wh-what in the world did you do?! H-how is Iliad alive?! What did you do to make that child suddenly whole again?! There has never been a single case of a demon-person returning to humanity!"
"...Calm down. And ask one thing at a time. I can't hear myself think."
"Ah..."
Whether his composure had caught her or not, Felicia quieted a little, and the look she turned on his wrecked state was plainly ashamed.
"F-forgive me."
She seemed embarrassed that she could not keep her calm. He understood. The son she had believed would never come back to himself had returned in a human shape. Who could stay cold through that? It was practically the shock of watching the dead walk in through the door.
So he did not scold her. He answered coldly instead.
"...Sorry to say this when you've only just started looking relieved, but do something for your son. Now. He isn't safe yet."
"What?"
"Aura, whatever you've got—use it. Leave him like that and he dies."
"!!?"
Felicia's hands were on Iliad's body before the warning had finished leaving his mouth, and in less than a minute she was staring in shock.
"Y-yes. I see. So this is how—!"
She understood what was required of her, and Aura roared out of her at once.
Vooooom.
A vast quantity of it wrapped Iliad like a cocoon. It gathered with particular density over his chest—over the heart—as if the light itself had decided to stand guard there.
"...Wh-what did you do? How?"
While that uncanny Aura poured out and everyone else stared, blank and unable to grasp the scene, only Derek—curiosity outrunning the rest of him—asked. What mysterious method had he used?
"Nothing special. Killed him once and brought him back. That's all."
"??"
"Well. More precisely..."
He had destroyed the heart. Once.
The day before, in the Tunnels, the boy called Taechang had said it. He had explained the line that divided the lower fighting arts from High Internal Art.
It was this.
"The reason the fighting arts the nobles learn—the ones from the great houses, the ones classified as High Internal Art—are what they are... is that they consume a monster's Monster Core."
A shocking fact.
As everyone knew, put a monster to use as food and demon-humanization began its work; swallow a Monster Core and you became a demon-person with no way back. That was the common sense of the world. Taechang's words tore straight through it. This was the sort of revelation that could shake not only the kingdom, but the continent.
Except.
"Ah, of course you can't just eat it. You have to dilute it, refine it, and turn it into an elixir. It's a secret art of the great noble houses, you could say."
Perhaps one really did have to hear a man out to the end. The rest of Taechang's explanation was easy enough to accept.
"As you know, fighting arts were invented in the first place so human beings could fight monsters and demons and things of that kind. But honestly, it doesn't make sense, does it? Detonating life energy inside the body so you can gain dozens of times your physical ability... no matter how you look at it, that's suicide."
A way of fighting an ordinary human could not endure. Once or twice might be survivable. Repeat it, and the body would fail, and the man would die. Even if the flesh held, his life force would burn out, and he might not live to see thirty. The records said as much: in the early days, those who used the fighting arts often ended their lives in their twenties, undone by that very cost.
And so the researchers had been forced to choose. Abandon the art as it was, or find a way to use it without the art using them up. People's choice, of course, was the latter.
"They looked for a way to improve it. And the researchers fixed on the phenomenon of demon-humanization."
Through that phenomenon—sometimes called demon-sickness—a human gained strength that was, quite literally, superhuman. The researchers saw a possibility in it.
"They decided to concentrate the demon-humanization in exactly one place."
Leave the brain and the rest of the body untouched. Trigger it in one place only. The most important organ in a human body, the seat where the source of life resides.
The heart.
"The heart."
Heart reinforcement. Induce an artificial demon-humanization in the heart alone, and possess a heart made stronger for it. The researchers were convinced that this was the road by which the fighting arts could go further. After endless experiment and verification, the method spread among those who held power, and on the strength of that research the countless knightly houses succeeded—over decades, over centuries—in completing fighting arts of their own.
"That's why High Internal Art can't even be compared to the lower arts, and why it put into noble hands a power that let them build authority no one else could challenge. Even if commoners learned the secret of reinforcing the heart, surpassing a great house's independent art and its elixir methods—things built on centuries of trial, error, and experiment—would still be a distant hope. In terms of the gap in technique, it would be nearly the difference between a steam engine and a rocket."
That was the secret at the core of the nobility's High Internal Art, and hearing it for the first time had left Lee Han blank.
"This world or that one... wherever you go, there are people committing truly insane acts."
"Th-they say they didn't experiment on decent people, mostly. They say it was mostly atrocious criminals..."
"And you believe that?"
"..."
"I'm not condemning it. Human progress has that kind of darkness in it. Even so... honestly. There's no romance in it."
"Mmm..."
He could not deny that it cracked his childish idea of things a little. Well, childish ideas existed to be cracked, so he had let it pass, and after hearing the story he had even managed to forget it for a while.
Until today.
"I remembered. The secret of the fighting arts."
"G-good heavens... a secret like that..."
"Kunta surprised too."
"If it got out, it would cause enormous chaos, so it's a fact that usually doesn't."
"And if it did get out, there would be people carelessly swallowing Monster Cores, so there's all the more reason to be careful."
Gomsuni and the big one gaped in turn. The wolf pup and Taechang, who had already known the secret, scratched at their cheeks with a bitter little look.
"Well. An uncomfortable secret."
Lee Han snorted at the ones who so plainly looked stung. Really, those brats' flaw was that they weren't aristocratic enough.
"If you're a noble, be a noble. A little short on luck, and a little short on humanity. Tch."
"Please stop hating nobles..."
"This is discrimination, Instructor."
"Oh, can it. I only ended up saying it, but the point isn't where the fighting arts came from, or who's right and wrong. I'm explaining how I treated the fairy-tale writer."
He told them to quit the interruptions, and they shut their mouths tight. Getting a word through to them was a project worthy of a professional problem child. Had his body been in one piece he would have barked them into shape, but Lee Han was spent to the bone, so he settled for answering their curiosity instead.
"Honestly, my treatment wasn't much of anything."
A guess, founded on belief.
"I just didn't think that man, of all people, was fool enough to eat monster meat or the stones cut out of them."
A stupid man, maybe. A foolish one. The Iliad he had seen was neither. If anything, he was wise—remarkably so. So how had a man like that become a demon-person?
"If he'd been poisoned by an illness that was already latent in him, then even he would have been helpless against it. Wouldn't he? That was the thought."
He did not know the method. But if something like a monster's cells, seated in the heart, had spread through the whole body the way a cancer does, then becoming a demon-person was no strange thing at all. A qi deviation, in the old sense. He had guessed at a tragedy born when the energy center called the heart ran wild, and with that guess in hand—
"I broke it. Crude as that."
"..."
"Well. Fortunately, it seems the guess was right."
"...S-so it was a gamble."
"Mm. Maybe."
"..."
"What?"
"..."
The confidence was shameless past all belief, and they were at a loss for words. But they were just as astonished as they were appalled.
C-can a person even think of something like that in a situation like this?
To keep that kind of judgment with humanity's natural enemy standing in front of him, and to hit on a treatment in the middle of a fight—those were certainly signs of an extraordinary man. The trouble was that he was so extraordinary an ordinary person could barely accept the idea.
"B-but, Master. I understand the principle, and the process. If you destroyed his heart, how is Lord Iliad still alive?"
A fundamental question: break a heart, and a man usually dies. Lee Han shrugged.
"I split Gyeong into two strikes. The first destroyed the inside of the heart. The second protected the outside, and held off the collapse for a little while. Because of that the heart stopped for a moment, but fortunately he came to..."
He flicked a finger.
"And there was a means of regenerating the heart, so I figured it would be fine."
"..."
Where his finger pointed, the Sword Duke was pouring a tremendous Aura into rebuilding her son's heart, with attention for nothing else. Even in the middle of that, his disciples very nearly applauded.
"Instructor... you truly never break a promise."
"I told you. I hate lies."
"...Ha."
Arno let out a hollow laugh threaded with admiration, and bowed his head.
Truly...
"...I respect you. I really do."
What an incredible man.