What Cause Does a Knight Fight For? (1)
Splash! A trout leapt from the river. The mist had lifted, and a rare shaft of sunlight struck the water, as if the trout itself were glad of it.
But the trout—no. To be precise...
Splash! Splaaash!
The trout began flinging themselves into the air because he was slowly setting his feet into the water. Was this what they called a living thing's survival instinct? They thrashed for their lives, after a fashion, and he only cocked his head.
"What's wrong with you lot?"
He had no mind at all to threaten them, so he couldn't see why this was happening. He only creased his brow, wondering if the whole school had gotten into something foul.
But soon enough.
Rumble!
"Ah. So it's because of that."
The trout were going mad over the battle raging far off. This place sat a fair distance from the fighting, and if they were reacting even here, then whatever was being fought out there had to be tremendous.
He knew a battle was underway. Even so.
"Maybe I'll catch one and slice it up raw."
He remained perfectly at his leisure. It wasn't that he failed to grasp how serious the fight was. He was simply believing. They had met sword against shield in deadly earnest, and he was the man who had taught them himself.
Needless worry.
They were strong. Strong one by one, and dozens of times stronger when they moved as a group...! He rarely rated anyone that highly, so his trust ran deep, and he felt neither worry nor unease. If anything, what stung was that he hadn't cut down that damned pervert with his own hands.
But regret was a thing a man had to throw away quickly.
I do what I have to do.
Whoooosh! At some point he had waded out past any footing, and now he was swimming, with the waterfall looming before him. People would have called it a spectacle even from a distance, and standing right in front of it, its grandeur was of another order. Set beside the great falls that dropped water by the hundreds of tons, it was almost cute—but lose your footing and get dragged in, and swallowing a man whole would be no trouble at all.
"Well. Not bad."
Then again, for a man who bench-pressed in increments of a thousand kilograms every day, and had already shrugged off pressures far greater than this, it didn't stir much feeling. If there was a problem, it lay elsewhere.
Free diving isn't exactly my specialty.
With a wry smile, Lee Han hauled in a deep breath and dove beneath the waterfall with no gear at all. The world he had thought endlessly bright, thanks to the sun, went black in a heartbeat. Darkness that light could not reach closed in at once. An ordinary person would have trembled from head to toe at a blackness like pitch, but Lee Han simply kept diving. There was no light, and yet his eyes gleamed as if they held starlight.
And so he...!
"Pwah!!"
Hack—hack!!
...learned in his own flesh that diving was not a thing just anyone could do.
Drip. Drip....
"Fourth try. Made it on the fourth...."
Lee Han had succeeded in the dive. Three hundred and fifty meters, give or take? With the world record hovering somewhere around a hundred and thirty, one might well wonder whether such a thing was possible for a human being. It was possible only because his lung capacity was absurd, and his skin and bones were tougher and harder than metal. That he had still needed four attempts was probably because he was a beginner at diving.
Beginner or not, the point was that he had succeeded. Lee Han rose slowly, shaking the water off.
It was really here?
The fellow who had reinvented himself as a bomber had been plenty sure of himself, but Lee Han had never imagined a secret grotto would exist in a place this straightforward. No—wasn't the hiding spot absurdly sloppy...?
Ah. It isn't sloppy at all, is it?
Even if you knew the Mordred Secret Grotto lay beneath the waterfall, diving three hundred and fifty meters to reach it was not something an ordinary person could do in the first place. To say it again: Lee Han's body was not merely tough in skin and bone. His viscera and every other organ were tough and sturdy enough that a dive like this was possible with nothing but his bare body. Without that, even the most advanced equipment would have made reaching this depth all but impossible—and that was while enduring the pressure and pull of a violent waterfall besides.
It was something only Lee Han could have done, and something only Lee Han could have found.
Even so.
"...How'd they even build a place like this?"
Even the man who had come this far found it uncanny. A vast space, full of air, in a place like this.
"Don't know how the structure works, but it's certainly something...."
A breeze seemed to stir, and Lee Han grew certain there was an entrance to this underground space somewhere up on the surface. Which, once he realized it, left him wondering if he hadn't been a complete idiot, showing off by taking the shortcut.
"Hm...."
Just as a slow self-loathing began to creep in, there were, fortunately, beings on hand to put an end to Lee Han's brooding.
"Grrrr!"
"Grrrrr...!"
"...Do great nobles raise things like this in their secret grottos?"
What appeared in a flash were "wild dogs." Not real wild dogs. Demonic nature clung to them, and one glance was enough to know they were monsters. They resembled Dobermans, though each was about twice the size of a respectable specimen, and if you scraped out every last scrap of a dog's charm or good looks and stuffed the hide with nothing but savagery, this is what you would get.
"Hellhounds?"
By another name.
They sprang.
"Kahaak!"
They were the beasts called hellhounds. A pack of what looked like thirty spotted Lee Han and kicked off the ground, rushing him at once. Teeth bared like saws, they came to tear him apart, and then—
Clang!
"Kyiiing...?!"
—their teeth shattered. Every last one that had charged.
"Waste of all that size, you bastards."
Lee Han clicked his tongue, as if they weren't even worth dodging. They looked the part, but could the likes of these even gnaw on rock? They still clung to him, trying to bite, and yet they hung there without opening so much as a scratch. A hellhound's eyes met his. Savage as their faces were, they were dogs all the same, and their eyes were wet. They almost seemed to be begging for their lives. Lee Han...
"—You reek of killing intent, and now you play pitiful? Who the hell is going to fall for that?"
Crack! He tore their necks from their bodies.
Inside the Hidden Grotto, strangely enough, an ecosystem had taken shape. There were no trees or grass, but countless glowing mosses and mushrooms, and monsters of the same kind as the hellhounds whose heads and bodies Lee Han had just parted, all at once. He guessed they had been summoned by the evil energy drifting through the grotto.
It was not a particularly strange phenomenon. Just as undead were sometimes born of evil energy or death-qi, monsters had a way of multiplying from nothing more than the carcasses of animals that happened to drift in from outside.
...At that rate, weren't they germs, or mold?
Correct.
Get down to it, and they are mold.
What made them worse than mold was this: the more of them bred, the more they used that breeding as an offering to birth a stronger monster. Namely—
"Grrrrrr!"
"Kahaak!"
—things like that came into being.
A dog with two heads howled. A monster that looked overwhelmingly stronger than the hellhounds snarled, and looking at it, something surfaced in Lee Han's mind.
"Orthrus, was it?"
Working as an instructor, he left most of the labor to the assistant instructors, but there were still plenty of books he had no choice but to know, or to read, himself. He thought he had seen it in one of them, a volume called the Monster Compendium. A monster spoken of, alongside the three-headed hound, as one of the higher monsters among the dog-types.
...Though why it had been ranked a higher monster, he couldn't quite recall.
Should've read the thing properly.
Lee Han scolded the past self who had only skimmed. It would have been better if he'd read it carefully. But then, they said regret came too late no matter when you felt it.
"Kraaang!"
Boom!
Orthrus let out a great howl, and for an instant the cry was so huge the whole Hidden Grotto shook. A roar steeped in killing intent put out tremendous force by itself, and Lee Han's eyes narrowed to slits.
"Grrrr!"
"Hissss."
Orthrus seemed, just for a moment, to be wearing a sneer, as if it had misunderstood and thought Lee Han had already lost his nerve at the roar. Its two heads and serpent tail glistened, sighting prey. What came off those reddened eyes was hunger, and Orthrus had marked Lee Han as food.
And Lee Han, who caught the monster's thoughts through that red light...
"Wow. Will you look at this ridiculous little bastard."
He was past disbelief. Was it seriously confident with nothing more than that? A roar? Don't make him laugh. He could not begin to understand how anyone called a thing like that a roar, or claimed it planted fear in prey. Because if you were going to talk about a roar...
"—Hey. You mongrel bastard. Watch close. A roar is done like this."
"Grr?"
"Hhh—!"
Lee Han drew in a breath, and thought. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since he let one out. And not just anything—
"AAAAAAAAH!"
A thunderous roar—vaster and fiercer than any high-rank monster's cry, a roar of spirit fit to shatter stone—shook the Hidden Grotto to its roots.
Rumble!
The quake's aftermath was not confined to a single place. It struck the whole ecosystem of the Hidden Grotto, which meant...
"...What sound is this?"
...it reached the warriors who had been surviving in this cave for a long time.
"It would seem a new high-rank monster has been born, my lord."
"Hah. Orthrus alone is headache enough,"
"Even so, would it not be to our good if the two of them wounded one another?"
"...Yet should one survive and devour the other, it will be a calamity."
"......"
His judgment was sound. As he said, high-rank monsters were troublesome things that grew stronger by devouring monsters their equal, or greater. If Orthrus in particular grew into a still higher being, the way of bringing it down would only grow more troublesome. And so.
"Felix."
"Yes, my lord!"
"I fear you will have to suffer a little. Whichever of them wins, I care not. Watch for your chance, take the wounded monster's life, and return."
In truth, it was a dishonorable command. It was not a fair contest. It was an order to take a life by cowardly means. Any other man would have claimed the right to refuse such an order...
Thud!
"Your servant, Felix de Mordred, shall obey my lord's command!"
It did not apply to the man called Felix.
"Hmm. Have you truly understood?"
"I have!!!"
"...You may speak quietly."
"Understood—!!!"
"Hm...."
Distrust of his loyal knight gathered on the family head's face. He could trust the skill. The mind of the warrior who made those clear eyes, he could not.