What Justification Does a Knight Have to Fight? (3)
There is a certain scene that turns up again and again in the old martial arts novels.
"You dare use heretical arts! I will kill you and avenge my disciple, who died so wronged!"
"No—it isn't heresy. It's our sect's secret art, never taught beyond the gate. And your disciple was a criminal. Human trafficking, murder, the whole list."
"Silence!"
"……."
"Are you looking down on me?!"
"What exactly do you want me to do…?"
That was the shape of it: a grudge born of logic with its character smashed clean through, or a fight dressed up in the classic double standard—rules for thee, never for me. Tastes differed on whether anyone actually enjoyed the trope, but it appeared so often that anyone who had read more than a little of the genre tended to shrug and think, Well. This much, I suppose…
And no wonder. After the sword had already gone in, scenes like the next one ran wild everywhere.
"I am a scion of the Nine Great Sects, or else of the Five Great Clans, so even if I meant to kill you, you are obliged to spare me. And you, standing on the orthodox side with the rest of us, must become the hunting dog that stakes its life against the Demonic Cult, or whatever strange organization comes after."
Set beside that, the earlier nonsense had come to seem merely ordinary. Mild, even.
Trash personalities were the very root of a martial arts novel. Lee Han had nodded along to that idea often enough himself, half as if he had been brainwashed into it.
And yet…
…The moment it happens to me, it feels foul.
He looked at the man turning a ridiculous delusion into open hostility, and distaste crawled over him. Who did this bastard think he was, standing in Lee Han's way and passing judgment? Stopping him from finishing a monster was bad enough. Watching the man invent his own story and then bare his fangs on the strength of it only piled the irritation higher. Heroes in those novels who swallowed this kind of garbage and still called the offender brother, or friend, had to be saints. Which meant, put the other way around—
Crack.
I was never built to be a saint.
Lee Han drew an axe instead of a sword and fixed the man with a glare. A man could misunderstand whatever he liked. Lee Han was under no obligation to indulge the misunderstanding. He was just beginning to raise his spirit when—
Clank.
"?"
…the other man, out of nowhere, set his own sword down on the ground.
"Hm! Come, then!! Monster, I shall meet you with my bare hands!!"
"Why?"
"There is a chance you are not a monster, but a human, so I will not use a weapon!!"
"…What?"
The absurdity of it was so complete that the rising disgust faltered, then died outright. Lee Han found himself wondering what on earth the man was saying.
"You said with your own mouth that you are human! I possess no discernment that can tell whether that is true or false!! Which is to say, I might commit the error of turning a blade upon a man!! So I thought on it, and I recalled my master's words. Master said that when one is uncertain, one should set down the sword and use the fist!! Clash fists, and you come to know the other's true heart…! Truly, there has never been wiser teaching!!!"
"……."
"Come, then! Mighty one who may be monster or man!! My name is Felix! I am a proud knight of Mordred!!"
"……."
"Why do you not come?"
"…I can't tell if you're kind, insane, or just strange."
"Where in all the world is there a human that strange!!"
"Yeah…"
……He had not expected to meet a human that strange either.
The Mad Mordred. Lee Han finally understood why the name had stuck.
Felix de Mordred. Had the knights of the kingdom heard that name, most of them would have gone round-eyed. He was none other than Mordred's Fighting Dog, and he was one of the seven young knights who stood for the South.
An old knight who had met all seven had once said that if any among the young could surpass the Dire Wolf of Galahad and the Black Lion of Lionel—the two reckoned finest of their generation—it would be none other than the Fighting Dog. Asked why he thought so, the old knight had answered thus.
"Because he is stupid, and simple."
"…Pardon?"
"And that is why he is a strong knight."
"??"
It was not a statement anyone could easily make sense of. Even so, Felix de Mordred was plainly a knight who might one day become the greatest in the South. Not a single knight had raised an objection to the old man's assessment, and so the people had waited, wondering how far a man already rated so highly might have come since then.
And now…
WHAM!
"!"
…Felix was flying backward off the other man's fist.
He stood two meters and eighty tall, and his weight, matching that frame, pressed close to two hundred and fifty kilograms. He outweighed even Maximus, and the size was not empty bulk. His whole body was a weapon: hard muscle, and not a scrap of fat. And yet a man like that had just been sent some two meters through the air by the fist of an opponent in a far lower weight class. He had blocked. He was certain he had blocked, and still—
A tremor ran up the arm he had raised in guard. It had gone numb.
Truly.
"No different from an iron fist!!"
"Do you have to narrate every single thing?"
"A loud voice is no flaw!!"
"Th-that's true, I guess?"
Whoosh!
The man closed the distance again in an instant and drove a punch in. This time Felix did not block. He threw a fist of his own, and in the next moment a shock like falling lightning burst between them.
BOOM!
It was the impact of two men's fists colliding, and both of them were forced a step back.
"…How did you train that body?"
Lee Han's face held a little surprise. Meeting someone he could brawl with barehanded was strange enough to startle him, and Felix, feeling much the same, answered with open satisfaction, proud as a banner.
"Hm! For five years I stood beneath a waterfall and tempered my flesh! Furthermore, the earth-force within this Hidden Grotto is stronger than it is outside!! Every part of this place forges me!! Thus I dare boast that my body may be compared to steel!!"
"Impressive."
"You are impressive as well!!!"
"Th-thanks?"
"I come again!!"
"You're announcing it first?"
"Hup!"
Rather than answer, Felix hauled in a great breath and swung.
Whoosh!
It was the crudest punching imaginable. There was nothing one could call technique—only the rough body-work of a man who happened to be known for his fists around the neighborhood. It was not a posture a knight, a professional of battle, ought to show, and a watcher might well have mistaken it for a man fighting this way because he had no skill at all.
THUD!!
"!"
One blow was enough to kill that idea. He did not need technique. The crudeness itself was the virtue: simple, and therefore violent, a single punch heavy enough to shake a castle wall.
"Is that a fist, or a cannon…?"
It had not felt like being struck by a hand. Lee Han said it the way a man complains of a bruise, and Felix only laughed, broad and delighted.
"It has been a long time since I met a strong man who can stop my blow! No—the first since Sir Maximus, was it not!!"
"…That guy?"
"We crossed fists briefly, five years ago! He was truly strong! As much as I have grown, Sir Maximus must have grown still further!! But you are no small matter either, mighty one who may be man or monster!!"
"……."
"My own fist aches from striking you! I wonder what that body is made of!!"
"I was about to say the same about you…"
"Hm! What was that!!"
"…Just shut up and come at me. My ears hurt."
"So I shall!!!"
"……."
…Better to swing a fist than open his mouth.
It was only a small mutter, but Felix's thunderous shout buried even that.
CRACK!
BOOOOM!
Lee Han and Felix had set armor and weapons aside and were pounding each other with nothing but their bodies. Anyone watching might have mistaken it for a rehearsed play, so relentlessly did the two of them trade blows. Head and gut were the baseline. Eyes, solar plexus, ribs—even a man's most vital point—they struck without mercy. It was a brawl with not a shred of quarter given. A spectator might have wondered whether the hits were somehow light.
KRA-BOOOOM!!
They were not. Every blow rang like a cannon being fired, and the sound itself announced the force behind it.
CRUNCH!
Lee Han's fist went wide for an instant and struck the wall. The wall was not tofu. Even so it caved, then burst apart in shards. A monstrous strike—and the man called Felix had eaten dozens of them and looked merely unimpressed. What in the world was he?
BOOOOM!
Then Felix's own fist, missing by a single centimeter, reduced a boulder to powder. Each of them, in other words, had already taken the equivalent of dozens of cannon shots. Anyone who saw the brawl would have felt their skin crawl, knowing that had they stood in that place they would long since have been minced into meat. A knights' bare-fisted exchange was a festival of destruction that turned the knees to water.
And yet…
"Ptoo."
"Hoo!!"
The only unreal thing was how intact both faces remained. Their expressions might have been calm, but neither man could hide his admiration, and their eyes burned.
How does a guy like this even exist?
Lee Han was certain of one thing. Next to this one, Maximus wasn't even ignorant.
This man really dumped everything into raw strength, didn't he?
There was a reason for the awe. If a knight could be compared to a game character, and if his abilities were broken down, they might divide into five stats at the fewest and ten at the most—agility, durability, strength, stamina, technique, and the like. By that measure, the man in front of him was an extreme.
Nothing but Power!
A man who meant to live as a knight ought to raise the smaller things as well—knowledge, wisdom, technique, judgment—at least a little of each. This one might as well have declared, I don't know about any of that. I'm just putting every point into strength. Lee Han was sure the build was that lopsided.
A lunatic, then. Just a different breed from that other one.
Maximus. If every stat had a ceiling of one hundred, that man could be said to have raised all of them evenly to the cap. If a perfect all-rounder existed, lacking in nothing, it would look like him. Lee Han himself had raised his stats across the board as well, but strength and durability had been pushed to one hundred and two, while the rest would not clear ninety. Extreme in his own way, perhaps, and yet he had still invested something in the other numbers. That much was true.
This man, though…
Strength at one hundred and five. Everything else, sixty. Seventy if I'm being generous.
Did that make him weak?
FWOOOSH!
No. It did not.
KRA-BOOOOM!!
With a splitting crack, Lee Han's body lifted and flew. His balance held, so he did not tumble in an ugly heap; he took the hit still on his feet. Even so, the arm that had blocked tingled down to the bone. They were crude punches. If he meant to dodge, he could have dodged.
"Ha. What kind of strength is this?"
The pull born of that pressure dragged at his body like a vacuum. He tried to slip aside, and the current caught him anyway. It was a sensation he had never felt before.
"…So if your strength is good enough, you don't even need technique. Or a brain."
"Strength merely assists! What matters is a steadfast conviction!!"
"……."
"What is it?"
"…Nothing. I was just thinking you might actually be a model knight."
"Praise me if you like! I will not go easy!!!"
"Yeah, yeah."
He meant it. Lee Han had never seen a knight this exemplary. And no wonder.
They say the simpler and cruder a knight is, the stronger he gets. Turns out it's true.
Of every knight he had ever met, Felix was the most extremely simple, and the most extremely ignorant. Lee Han let out a hollow laugh. Was this how other people felt when they looked at him…?
Where did a monster like this come from…?
Felix, for his part, was thinking something else entirely.
Haha. And what manner of thing is this, that my own fist cracks the more I strike him!
The more he hit, the more the loss was his. He was beginning to wonder what, exactly, he was fighting.
…Is he not human?
Even as he doubted the man was human at all, a quieter suspicion kept rising. A human weapon.