The Challenge That Lets You Live Tomorrow
Bzzzz!
The bees welcomed their master as if they meant to pick a fight about it. Where have you been? Only showing up now?
It had been barely five days since he last saw them, and yet they looked a little bigger. He told himself it was his imagination.
"It is not your imagination—they really grew! What kind of bee gets as big as a puppy? For the love of—!"
To correct the record, the bees were not a little bigger. They were enormous. It was a rate of growth that did no shame to the valiant name Tiger-Wolf Bee.
"Don't stand there looking pleased—do something about them! Why do they keep trying to attack me, these little bastards!"
"Maybe because you're a stranger to them. More to the point, Assistant, where have you been? I don't think I've seen you lately."
"Standing your watch and filling out your paperwork in your place...!!"
"Were you? ...Keep up the good work."
"!?!!"
Damian Paulet—official slave of the sword faculty, or rather its Assistant Instructor, a man rapidly making a name for himself as a master of paperwork—flushed red, then blue, then a furious crimson that looked ready to burst. With a roar thick with rage, he kicked off the ground, hammer in hand. The thing had become his trademark.
"Mutiny?"
"Revolution, you bastard!!"
Damian hoisted the iron hammer of revolution high, resolve clenched in his grip. A resolve to land at least one solid blow on his opponent, no matter what it took.
Whoosh!
He was fast. Whether the sheer mass of his anger had granted him some kind of buff, Damian's hammer sang with roughly twice his usual strength and speed. Not Sword Resonance. Hammer resonance...! In a sense, it felt like the grand moment in which the legend of the Hammer Knight began.
Crack!
"...Huh?"
"Did you take an elixir or something? You're a bit stronger than last time."
"??"
The hammer had been stopped with ease. No—stopped was too kind a word. Lee Han did not even seem to think blocking was necessary. He flicked it aside with the back of his hand, and the spring of the muscle there snapped the hammer outright, a bizarre sight Damian was forced to witness with his own eyes. His opponent, kindly enough, explained.
"My body's gotten a little sturdier."
"Sturdier than that?"
"It just sort of happened."
"...I'll be damned. Even a large beast wouldn't be this bad."
"Enough. That was decent."
Thump.
"Work harder."
"...Shit."
Damian Paulet spat the curse and watched a finger come swimming into his vision. The instant that finger flicked toward his forehead—
Thwack!
He lost consciousness.
Even the Light is heartless...
The man had already been hard as stone. Make him harder still, and what was anyone supposed to do? Damian raised his middle finger at the sky with that complaint loaded into the gesture, and so his consciousness slipped away.
Lee Han looked down at the Assistant Instructor, eyes rolled back in a dead faint, and felt a pure, uncomplicated admiration.
"Not bad, this one."
"I heard Sir Damian bought a mid-grade elixir with the money he saved helping the other faculties lately. The medicine must have taken well."
"So it really was doping?"
Hearing that the kid had doped just to land one hit on him, Lee Han wondered whether he had been driving him too hard. Then he felt the heavy impression the hammer had left behind, and the guilt vanished in a hurry.
"No. This one's the type you have to push. He gets stronger when you drive him."
"Are you serious?"
"You saw the hammer resonance, didn't you? If that isn't proof, what is?"
"Th-then you mean you'll keep driving him like this from now on?"
"It's pain in the service of growth."
"......"
Derek genuinely pitied Damian, and genuinely thought he was impressive. The boy would go on shouldering the instructor's work, and the fact that a man could grow stronger even by a method like that was, in its way, a kind of talent. A pitiful talent, admittedly. Still, when he thought of the sort who would sell even their souls for strength, Damian was comparatively lucky. Wasn't he?
"But why are you still here? Go home."
"...Lady Karin is at my house."
"......"
Was he rubbing it in?
A little strength gathered in Lee Han's fist, but he clenched his teeth and spoke as gently as he could manage.
"Then get lost and go to your girlfriend."
To repeat: that was him being gentle.
"...I-I can't."
"Why?"
"Sh-she threw me out."
"?"
"B-before, I came back pretty badly hurt once, and I kept it a secret from Lady Karin when I went..."
"That's on you. Go grovel, idiot."
"I-if I apologize, there's a chance Lady Karin will follow me every time I go somewhere dangerous from now on. So I can't apologize."
"You're more of a romantic than you look."
"Haha..."
"Don't laugh. That wasn't a compliment."
"...Yes..."
Taechang looked thoroughly deflated, but Lee Han was not generous enough to comfort a scheming brat. In the end, this was a lovers' quarrel for each other's sake.
There's a realm even to rubbing salt in a wound...
Lee Han felt he had learned something, and seriously considered flicking this one on the forehead too. The more he thought about it, the more irritating the kid was.
Then—
"...Instructor, I've thought about it carefully, and no matter how I look at it, the reason Sir Iliad didn't die has to be thanks to you."
"Are you changing the subject?"
"No. I'm not changing the subject."
"Then what's with the sudden nonsense?"
He had already saved the man. Now the fact that Iliad wasn't dead was his doing too?
"Wh-what I mean is the original. According to the original, Sir Iliad should already have died before the first semester. And yet he's still alive, and he's survived safely besides. I suspect this whole chain of changes is thanks to you, Instructor."
"Do you think I'm omnipotent?"
Lee Han was dumbfounded. A man whose face he hadn't even known during the first semester, and he was supposed to have saved him? What kind of nonsense was that? He was starting to suspect a Heart Demon had taken root in Taechang's head, and wondering whether he ought to treat it, when the boy began pouring out arguments that were, annoyingly, rather persuasive.
"What if the monster terror attack hadn't been stopped?"
"?"
"Back then, if you hadn't been there—if the students you'd trained hadn't been there—the gnolls would have spilled across the whole Royal Capital, no question. They might even have reached the Offen estate."
"......"
"And that's not all. What if you hadn't caught the Illegal Mages hiding in the academy? No one would have known what wicked schemes those Illegal Mages might hatch, and they might even have cooperated with traitors like Gardin and Elsa, don't you think?"
"Isn't your imagination running away with you...?"
"Yes, I'll admit that. But it also means the butterfly effects you've set off are this numerous. And you said it yourself, didn't you? That for three years after you became a knight, you went around destroying Illegal Mages and slave caravans? That alone is an enormous butterfly effect."
"...I get what you're trying to say, but does it matter now?"
"You have to examine the records of the past if you want to predict what kind of influence they have on the present. That's how you gather even a little more information, isn't it?"
A profound line of reasoning, unlike Taechang. Was the kid starting to take after his girlfriend just because she was smart?
"—is what Karin told me once. That I should keep my view wide, for a start."
"...You little—!"
The feeling shattered. Lee Han turned a gaze gone cold on him, and the boy looked awkward, as if he had only just realized he hadn't needed to add that last part. Unconsciously rubbing it in—an utterly vicious specimen. Had he noticed that Lee Han's expression was turning dangerous?
"I-I just wanted to say that there are people alive because of you, Instructor! S-someone ought to offer thanks, I thought.... Th-then!"
True to a boy whose survival instinct, at least, was excellent, he bolted the moment Lee Han's face turned grim. Lee Han clicked his tongue.
"Worrying about the strangest things, that brat."
He considered chasing him down and scolding him even now, but unfortunately—
"—He's worried about your sacrifices, I expect. From the look of it, you've lived hiding every feat you've accomplished, haven't you? That must be what bothered the child. He's a thoughtful boy."
He had a guest to receive, so he could not follow.
"Did you enjoy eavesdropping on someone else's whole conversation?"
"I-I didn't listen on purpose. I was only wondering when I ought to appear. ...Truly."
"Long excuse."
"...It isn't an excuse."
He had already caught on when the bees went suddenly quiet and hid away in their house, but confirming it this directly made his eyes narrow of their own accord.
"Why are you here? You should be spending a cozy time with your family."
"That was the plan, but there's still something I haven't done for you."
Felicia, a loose smile on her lips, hovered aloft astride a sword.
The sight of a woman flying some ten meters up, a sword for her stepping-stone, was nothing short of mystical. This was plainly a fantasy world, and yet she called to mind a Taoist immortal. Who would believe it? And she wasn't even Lü Dongbin.
"You've got a lot of tricks."
"Ah, this? It's nothing special. Anyone can do it, so long as they can float a sword in the air."
"...Isn't that itself an absurd condition to start with?"
Felicia laughed softly at Lee Han's retort and stepped lightly down to the earth, as if she felt sorry that he had to look up at her.
"I'm sorry again. I had no mind to eavesdrop."
"How much did you hear?"
"From the part about Iliad already having been meant to die."
"...So you heard all of it."
"Hehe. Which is why I apologized."
Felicia's composure did not waver in the slightest even after hearing that her own son was a man who ought to have died, and her eyes looked utterly steadfast—nothing like the way she usually folded at a breeze. Perhaps that puzzlement showed. Still wearing her leisurely smile, Felicia spoke.
"That child must possess a Mystery of future sight, I suppose. Forty years ago I saw a fortune-teller with a similar Mystery. Well, this one looks far sharper than that fortune-teller did."
"He meant no harm, so let it go."
"I said I wasn't angry. I only felt, in one corner of my heart, that it was a relief. That my son's fate had changed."
"......"
"If anything, I'm only grateful. Thanks to your existence, Iliad has survived two times running, hasn't he? How many times am I supposed to thank you, honestly..."
Felicia turned a deep, lingering look on Lee Han. Should he call it a gaze dripping with honey? It went past burdensome and raised goosebumps.
"It's unpleasant, so put those eyes away."
"It's a gaze full of affection."
"That makes it worse."
"...Impudent boy."
She only said so. The weight in Felicia's eyes did not disappear.
"It's the first time I've felt this grateful to anyone. You didn't only save my child. You shook the bad blood out from between my child and me."
Felicia remembered the conversation with her son before she came here, the two of them pouring out feelings that had sat too long. They had talked a great deal. A very great deal. And in doing so, she had come to know. She truly...
"I had never once praised Iliad. No—what I thought was praise had, in truth, only ever been commendation."
Could there be a mother this lacking in all the world?
"Don't worry. There are more parents worse than you in the world than you'd think."
"Where?"
"Uh—my parents, who sold me off as a slave?"
"......"
"So don't worry. Beasts worse than you are everywhere."
"Th-that is no comfort at all..."
Felicia was freshly reminded that the mouth is the root of disaster.
Lee Han asked again.
"So why did you really come?"
It was a scolding—why come here at all, when she ought to be giving her son all the praise she had failed to give until now—and underneath it lay the wish that they not meet for a while. Felicia, however, was not perceptive enough to catch a meaning like that. Her perceptiveness, though, was a different matter from other things.
"To give you a last teaching."
"?"
"When I thought about it quietly, it seemed I'd hardly taught you anything. I only strung together talk like drifting clouds, and I wondered if all I'd given you was teaching without any substance."
She was the sort who kept a promise, at least. However—
"And you're only realizing that now?"
From the student's side, being told he would receive proper teaching at this late hour was simply absurd, and at that look she flinched a little. She had a great many things to flinch over. Even so—
"T-to be honest, I never thought you'd come to handle Intent this early..."
If she were to make an excuse, her expectation had been that he would roll around and suffer a while longer, and that it would take him at least another half year at the soonest. A miscalculation that was, admittedly, a miscalculation.
"You broke that expectation of mine and reached the Intent you meant to head toward after all. It's something to be proud of, and something to be sorry for."
So wasn't it right that she fill in, at the last, whatever part she still could?
"Do you understand a little now what Intent is?"
"Roughly, yeah?"
"Hehe. Yes. It must still be a bit subtle."
"Mmm..."
Lee Han agreed with that. Yes, he knew what it was, more or less. There was some kind of power inside his body. But using it as he pleased was another matter entirely. In short—
"You're right that it's subtle. I know what it is, but if you told me to explain it clearly, I couldn't."
"That's only natural. Intent is like the sound of a song. You can hear it plainly, and yet there's a beauty there you cannot grasp."
"...?"
"...I was only saying something that sounded as if it meant something. Pay it no mind."
"Yeah, it looked like that."
It seemed like a line she had recited out of a book, and it was not a sentiment he could share. Intent was not a refined thing, like the sound of a song. Rather—
A new muscle.
Lee Han decided to think of it in the way that was easiest for him to accept.
Intent is a muscle.
For example, what if a human had been born with wings, or a tail?
You'd have to work if you wanted to handle them.
In that sense, Intent was a concept like such a tail, or such wings. A new muscle had appeared that he would have to train, and if he trained that muscle, a day would come when he no longer even felt the strangeness of it. A natural unification.
"Once I get that far, I could go around bragging that I'm one of the strong ones."
"You've understood it exactly. Yes—the stage of becoming one with one's Intent. As representatives of those who have reached that stage, there would be His Highness the Crown Prince.... No. Duke Blake, the Grand Duke of Lionel, and Marquis Jenimia, more or less."
"......"
That marquis really had been an incredible man.
So it was right that he went easy on me that day.
It was a mercy his gut hadn't been punched through, the day he stormed the marquis's house alone. As Lee Han wore a bitter smile edged with relief, her advice continued.
"It will be arduous, and it will be dull. Only steady effort and training will temper Intent. But I will not deceive you. If you keep at the effort, you will reach it someday, even if you are endlessly slow, like a turtle."
"That's a relief. Running even when I'm slow is my specialty."
"That is a very happy thing."
Softly, Felicia smiled, pleased by Lee Han's confident attitude. A man ought to have at least that much confidence. But what use was teaching that lived only in words?
"I'm not satisfied with words alone, so—will you experience it with your body once as well?"
"...Those are real swords."
"My collection."
Whatever they were made of, seventeen white swords of an immaculate whiteness rose high into the sky.
"Swords in which I have concentrated my Intent to a high degree. If you face them, they ought to be of some slight help."
"The edges are honed razor-sharp."
"I imagine they would slide right into that body of yours as well."
"...This is a notice of murder, isn't it?"
A woman who could turn his body into a hedgehog with wooden swords alone was now aiming dozens of real blades at him at once. It was nothing short of chilling. By common sense, there was no need to stake one's life for a very slight bit of growth.
"Ha—are you trying to kill me? What kind of lunatic does something like this..."
"So you won't do it?"
"You have to ask?"
"Obviously I'm doing it right now!"
...That, you see, was common sense.
A man is that sort of creature. Even knowing he may die in the middle of the challenge, even when a violent wave bears down before his eyes, he has no choice but to go forward. Because a man is a creature who lives tomorrow through challenge.
......That day, Lee Han was stabbed by twelve swords, and it was four days before he regained consciousness.