EP.56 — The Obvious Story He Wants to See (4)
His steps were as precarious as a hatchling's, a bird barely out of the shell.
"Hoo! Hoooh..."
He looked like a child who had only just learned to crawl and was now toddling along, and a full-grown man walking that way was absurd without end.
And yet.
"Hang in there, Iliad! Just a little more!"
"You can do it, Father!"
"Just a little farther and you'll have it, just a little...!"
"Oh! Magnificent!"
Far from laughing, they cheered him in deadly earnest, and they went wild over the mere fact that he was walking.
Sweat ran in streams.
"Haa, haaah!"
Iliad was pouring sweat as if he had lost his mind, and before long he was soaked through. The merciless spasms ripping through his legs were enough, on their own, to show how hard it was, and how much it hurt.
Lee Han wondered whether he ought to step in and help even now. But if they helped him here, everything the man had fought so hard for would mean nothing.
So.
"Just a little, just a little more...!"
Cheering was all they could do.
He forced out a shout like a man screaming through his teeth, and his feet managed another ten steps.
Thirty in all.
"Waaaaah!!"
Having succeeded in planting those thirty magnificent footsteps, Iliad flung both arms overhead as if roaring, and the people rushed to him, shouting their joy and showering him with congratulations.
And at the sight of it—
"...Anyone watching would think he'd just won the World Series."
Lee Han could only sigh. Of course he was glad too. There was no denying that.
"I told him to take it easy for a while.... He doesn't listen worth a damn."
The man had already been at it for three solid hours. It would have been stranger if the sigh hadn't come.
...Lee Han thought he understood, if only a little, how doctors felt when their patients refused to listen.
Make no mistake. This incident had wrecked Iliad's body past any hope of repair.
Before he became a Demon Person, it had only been that his legs would not serve him. After the demon-humanization, permanent damage far worse had been left all through his body—so severe that never walking again would have been the kinder fate.
In a way, it was only natural.
He had burned life force without restraint and forced his flesh to recover, so of course the body had paid for it, and worse, his lifespan had collapsed at a geometric rate. His heart, too, had been destroyed and then restored, so its durability could only have fallen.
By a miracle, an Aura User had treated him. The life force that had drained away was replenished, and the heart regenerated without too great a strain. Even so, a body that had been destroyed could not possibly be normal.
Aura was no cure-all, and the world was not a fairy tale in which everything resolved toward the good.
In truth, walking was the least of it. Iliad was in a state where he had to worry whether he would even live to see tomorrow.
"Th-the head of the house is walking!?"
"???"
...That was how it ought to have been. And yet the moment word spread that Iliad was suddenly toddling across the training ground, the place filled with people.
The yard was nearly the size of three baseball stadiums laid together, and the crowd packed it wall to wall in under five minutes. Who would believe it?
In a sense, it meant that for House Offen, Iliad walking again was a miracle second to none.
"Waaaaaah!"
The same roar as before rang out.
Lee Han had joked about a World Series championship, but wasn't this fervor something far greater than that?
"The Super Bowl, then?"
"And what is that supposed to be."
"...It's a thing. Anyway, why are you here? Busy as you are, just to cheer on your son."
"He would not hear any cheering of mine now, in any case. He is absorbed to that degree."
"Hoh. You had the sense to notice that?"
"...Plainly rude. And yet I have karma enough that I cannot even be angry."
Felicia grumbled, and Lee Han was not particularly surprised to find her suddenly at his side.
His own lack of surprise, however, was not shared.
"...How did you do it?"
"Do what."
"Iliad. How is my son walking again?"
"Ah. That. It's nothing special, really...."
"Nothing special, he says. Even now my heart is hammering...!"
Felicia herself still could not hide her astonishment. The reality delighted her, and yet it felt like a dream.
To say it once more, without qualification—her son...!
"He was completely broken. And you raised him up again...."
The joy of it was immense. How immense? It could stand beside the joy of the day she had given birth to Iliad.
And at the same time—
"I cannot help my curiosity, either."
She had lived past ninety, and she was an explorer who had ventured across roughly a third of the entire continent. She had stacked experience deep and varied enough that ordinary things no longer surprised her, and even she had never seen a thing like this.
To set a completely ruined man back on his feet....
What kind of miracle was this?
"Were you a saint, by any chance?"
"Do I look devout to you?"
"No. If anything, you are the sort to swing an axe at heaven."
"...I'm not quite that far gone."
"Set that aside and speak, quickly. How long do you mean to leave this old woman suffocating!"
"It's not as if you left him in my care...."
Lee Han was dumbfounded, but he knew curiosity was not an easy thing to press down. All the more when the thing in question had happened to one's own child.
Which was why—
"There's nothing all that special about it. Right now, that man is in a kind of puppet state."
He could give the answer with fair ease.
What Lee Han had done really was nothing special.
"I just made him feel Gyeong. That's all."
"Ah. That martial study you are said to have founded?"
"It's not grand enough to call a martial study...."
The principle was simple. The most primitive strength a human being possesses. Drawing out the force that comes from muscle and bone, from tendon, from the organs of the body.
And so Lee Han had—
"I taught his body the most basic sense of Gyeong. You could say I showed him a new road."
"...And that alone is enough for him to move like that?"
Listening, Felicia only grew more bewildered. She understood the principle, but she could not believe Iliad was walking on that alone. Frankly, a thing like that was possible with Aura if it was possible at all, and it was no difficult process. In other words, it was among the things she herself had already tried, and so his explanation did not reach her.
And just as she suspected—
"Of course it's impossible for you. Not unless you actually understand the body, that complicated machine."
"Mm?"
"I'm what you'd call a specialist. I understand how muscle moves and how bone is built, how the organs work, the nerves, the whole intricate machinery of the flesh."
The confidence that only he could do it showed in him. But that confidence was only natural.
Did Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation look easy? Did anyone imagine that passing a technique on to another person was simply easy? All of it was possible only because he had the experience, and because the experiments had been repeated hundreds of times over.
The mages ran a lot of experiments on me, once.
In that sense, specialists as fluent in the body's machinery as Lee Han were rare, which also meant there were feats only he could manage.
"What I put inside that man, Iliad, comes to two things. One is a core that lets him feel Gyeong. The other is a mechanism for transmitting force."
"A mecha... ni... what?"
"It's a thing. Put simply, his legs and arms aren't moving naturally. Think of him as operating them, the way you work a puppet."
Invisible threads beyond counting, controlling leg and arm, waist and shoulder, each one separately. It sounded easy, if you only heard it explained....
"Easy to say. Tell me to do that, and I couldn't. Not unless you were born with a brain unlike other people's."
It was possible because that man was that man. He handled Gyeong spread out like thread, stimulating muscle by muscle, and only after he understood each muscle's role and structure could he move a single step at a time. Even Lee Han did not find it easy. Ten seconds of it, and his head would blaze and his nose would pour blood.
That man was different. On talent alone, he had a mind that would rank first in the South.
"If he'd been an ordinary person, even a single step would have taken him more than three months, you know?"
"......"
"He can walk as much as he does now because he's who he is. Ah, but you need to understand this too. From here on, he won't be able to use Sword Resonance or Sword Qi. He'll have to spend every bit of his body's energy just on moving. And don't forget to stimulate the body with Aura every day, and to replenish his life force. Until his skeletal muscle mass surpasses the average man's, he'll be a jar with the bottom knocked out."
He piled on the further advice, then drove the nail in, as if to say this was as far as he could go.
...And yet.
"Why?"
"?"
"Why... would you go this far?"
Grateful as she was, Felicia could not understand. Even granting that they were the parents of his disciple, even granting that some slight bond had formed, in the end they were still nothing but strangers, were they not?
And yet....
"Why tend to us so carefully? Are Offen and I not, to you, merely a nuisance?"
In the end he had taken nothing. He had not wanted money, and he had refused honor with something closer to horror. He even tried to keep Aura Users at a distance, calling them a hindrance....
And still he had readily taught them his secret art, for their sake. He had made her son walk again.
"W-we have done nothing for you...."
Apology, and guilt. When she worked her fingers and condemned herself that way—
"Because you are good people."
"...What?"
"I helped because you're kind."
"......"
He recited the reason he had helped them with perfect flatness. As if it were a truly trivial reason.
"Me, I like happy endings. Even in fairy tales and plays. And the happy ending I like best is the one where people who live diligently get to live happily."
"......"
"But reality isn't the fairy tale. Good people die unreasonably early, more often than the bad ones, or they fall into despair. No one helps them. The bad ones, on the other hand, live well. They have plenty, in proportion to how foully they've lived."
"......"
"And that puts me in a filthy mood. So I thought. If I can...."
I'll at least help the good people around me.
"You only have to help a little. When that little help turns a gloomy story into a comedy, I find it worthwhile enough, in my own way."
Yes. That was the story he wanted to see. Good people becoming happy. A story far too trite, and far too obvious.
But.
"I want to see that obvious story. That's all it is."
"......"
"A worthless reason, isn't it? But what can I do. It's already come to this."
"......"
"Ah. In that sense, there is a price you can pay me."
"...Something I can give?"
"The ending."
"??"
"You remember what I advised you, don't you? Do it. Now."
"???"
...Iliad was in agony.
Walking hurt, and with every step his head did not merely throb. It felt as if it were burning away to ash. Until he grew used to it—no, even after he grew used to it—the agony would probably go on.
Even so....
So this is me, only just beginning.
Iliad was grateful that he could make an effort. That effort might be answered—that there was even the possibility—was a joy beyond anything. A life in which effort could be repaid was brilliant beyond compare, next to a life in which one could not even try.
Iliad was laughing with joy—
"—Iliad, my son."
"Mother?"
Drenched in sweat, Iliad showed his bewilderment at the mother who had suddenly barred his way. Was she about to tell him to rest? That he had pushed too hard? He meant to wave her off. This was nothing. He wanted to hold this joy a little longer. That was what he meant to say.
...What he meant to say. And yet.
"I... I am proud of you...."
"—."
"I am so very proud of you."
...For an instant, Iliad thought his ears had gone wrong. He could not understand why his mother would say such a thing in the middle of a training ground full of people, and he understood even less why she was suddenly praising him.
No. Before that.
...Unfamiliar.
He had wondered why he was so shaken, and then he knew. He had never heard words like those from his mother. Genius, splendid—he thought he had heard a fair amount of that. But praise like this....
"In every moment, I was proud of you. When you were first born. When you took your first steps. When your talent for the sword showed itself. When you showed me the first picture you ever drew. When you became head of the house so young. When you placed a grandchild in my arms. Even when you became a Demon Person, I was always proud of you. There was never a single day when I was not proud of you."
"......"
"I am proud of you. You are my treasure. My pride."
"........"
...What expression was he wearing now? Iliad could not understand it at all. Was his face twisted? Was he flustered?
Or else—
A trickle ran down.
"...I am sweating too much. The sweat is simply—"
"I had better wipe it away."
"Yes. I am sweating far too much. Enough that my eyes hurt...."
"...Yes. So it seems...."
For a while the mother and son stood blankly facing each other, trading empty words, and the people quietly made room.
......A mother and son who had never been honest, whose talk had never been enough, were at last showing something true, and to gawk at it would have been a mean sport.
"Well? Are you satisfied now?"
"About a six out of ten?"
"...How unkind of you."
"Unkind, sure."
He let out a short breath of a laugh.
"—High marks, for an obvious story."