What Justification Does a Knight Have to Fight (8)
The camp, which had been steeped in nothing but a grim and dismal air, grew loud in an instant. No—it went past loud. Vitality and life spilled through the place, and the men the world had ground down were nowhere to be seen. In their stead stood people with eyes gone moist, soft as sentimental poets.
Knights, soldiers, and servants shared one thing wherever the corners of their eyes had dampened. Every last one of them clutched a letter, reading it dozens of times over or pressing it, precious, to the chest. Plenty sniffled and choked up, and not a soul teased them for it. Their own eyes were red. One careless nudge and they would have broken into heartbroken sobs on the spot.
The man who had set this tide of feeling in motion nodded, as if he had expected nothing else.
In every country under the sun, nothing beats a letter from family or a lover for a soldier sent away.
Spend a single month in basic training, cut off from the outside, and the letter you receive then stays carved into your chest for the rest of your life. And this was not a month. Five years, sealed away from the world? Going mad over that would hardly be strange. Family left behind, a woman, friends—even people you had already cut loose—became someone to miss. For the record, Lee Han had felt it often enough on overseas deployments in his previous life.
Worth the trouble of hauling them.
An artifact pack under an expansion spell. He had seized it from a mage-slave—no, from that professor bastard—and it could hold up to fifteen hundred pounds. The drawbacks were simple. The weight of whatever you packed pressed on your body as it was, and the thing was single-use. Dump the contents, and then...
Crsssh.
"It really does turn to dust."
When he took it, the mage had ranted—Do you have any idea what it cost to make that, you bastard!! It's precious military matériel!! If it breaks, I'll be dragged into court, damn you!—but what did Lee Han care.
I used it for a good cause. That's enough.
The mage might be arrested, might be punished, but that was none of Lee Han's concern. If anything, he had done a kindness for soldiers in the field, so the man ought to march into court with a glad heart and still feel he hadn't paid enough. For a mage, it would be a glorious punishment if ever there was one. He would be going out after a good deed.
Tap, tap.
"Hm? What."
"Is there nothing for me?"
"?"
"Ah, my family is all staying in the Hidden Grotto, of course, but I have ties on the outside as well!"
"You do?"
"I do!"
Felix wore a face brimming with the certainty that of course there would be a letter for him too. Lee Han thought for a moment.
"What was your name again?"
"Felix de Mordred!"
"...Hmm. Doesn't look like there is one."
"That cannot be! Nothing from my beloved Suzanne?! She would surely have written!"
"...Suzanne? The one at the bakery?"
"You know her!"
"Sure. The patriot who bore six kids."
"???"
"Husband's handsome, too. Made me think, so that's what a match made in heaven looks like. Bread there was good. Oh, and I heard that before she married, Suzanne got a lot of weird threats from some lunatic. 'Bear my children!' That lunatic was you?"
"It was not a threat!! It was a confession!!"
"......"
"And she shed tears as a sign of her acceptance!!"
"Th-that wasn't acceptance. Wasn't it fear?"
"!!?"
"...What era are you living in, all by yourself?"
Why was he carrying on like some barbarian living alone in the Stone Age?
No. Even Stone Age people wouldn't be this bad.
Barbarians who had spent their whole lives in the jungle were better socialized than this. So why was a man who had lived his entire life in a city such a mess?
"...Is the whole Mordred bloodline actually like that?"
"A misunderstanding."
"Only that man is like that."
"Please do not take Felix as the Mordred average. It is simply that he alone is abnormal."
"It is true we carry a touch of madness from the Spirit Eye, but not at that level."
"......"
Sharp ears, too.
Lee Han traded easy greetings with the soldiers and let out a small breath of admiration as he faced the young men coming toward him.
Not bad.
The oldest looked to be in his mid-twenties, and even the ones still in their teens were remarkably well trained. Set them against the three prodigies of the sword faculty and they would come up a hair short—but that was no small thing. Those three could beat most knights, and these youths already held ability on that level at their age. That was what deserved the surprise.
"Faces are decent, too. Is that man the only mutant?"
"The greatest mystery of the house, I'll grant you. How a fellow like that was born of our blood... honestly."
"...He isn't your son, is he?"
"He is my second son's child. The second boy was sickly in body but sharp in the head, and that son of his is the opposite—too sturdy, and strange in the head, and there's the problem.... The world is a bewildering thing, a bewildering thing. Heh."
"......"
A thread of sorrow showed in Ganok when he spoke of his second son, and Lee Han had the sense not to ask why that son was not here.
Instead:
"So. Are you here because you want to chew me out?"
"...Hm? What do you mean?"
"Not you, elder. You. Don't sidle up beside me all of a sudden. I let it go because there was no hostility, but I don't know what I'll do if I snap."
He had decided on a productive conversation, and he brightened at the fact that the man in charge had finally shown himself.
...While issuing a small warning.
"—Just as Father said. You really are an interesting man."
For an instant the air wavered like a heat haze, and a person revealed himself. A handsome man who looked to be in his early twenties—no, a pretty one. Calling a man pretty might grate, but face him in person and the assessment came of its own accord. He had drawn near without the slightest sign of when or how, without even a presence or a scent, and the feat sat above even Orthrus's trick.
And yet Lee Han had found him.
"How did you find me? The ghosts were hiding my form."
"You were irritating."
"Hm?"
"I felt something like a slight dissonance. Hard to explain.... Hm. Well. I knew, anyway."
"......"
The way a forecast office reads the day's humidity, the strength of the wind, and the climb in temperature to judge the weather, Lee Han's nose, ears, and skin were always sensitive to his surroundings past all reason—sensitive enough to hand him more information than the instruments themselves. So, at the very least:
"If you want to hide from me, you have to mind a lot of things. The scent off your body, your temperature, your heartbeat, your breathing. I don't know about the rest, but you should at least have hidden your breath."
"......"
"What?"
"...Are you human?"
"...?"
Doubted as to his very species from the first meeting, Lee Han looked at him with a sour face.
Cain Arnold de Mordred, Margrave.
The reigning Margrave of Mordred—no, the man Lee Han had forcibly made the former margrave—looked endlessly young, but in truth he was in his mid-forties this year. It was not uncommon to hear that he ranked among the three greatest talents in all of Mordred's history, and he even bore the title King of the March. His station was only that of a count, and yet he was master of a power so vast that claiming something higher would not have been strange.
And such a man was bowing his head to a wanderer who had not even properly given his station or his name.
"Thank you. It has been a very long time since a smile touched their faces."
Endlessly polite. Blame for carrying outside news to the knights, the soldiers, and the servants on his own authority would not have been strange, yet all he offered was sincere thanks. Watching him made plain that he had the makings of a virtuous ruler rather than a tyrant.
Perhaps that was why.
"...If you're a noble, shouldn't you act like one? Arrogant. Looking at a wanderer like me with contempt in your eyes. Why are you so un-noble...? Are you really a great noble?"
"......"
Lee Han watched him with suspicion and wariness mixed together. He genuinely wondered whether this man was the great noble they called King of the March.
"...I can see, at any rate, that your image of the nobility is a poor one."
Margrave Cain's face was sour, and a little hurt. Somehow the judgment, from the very first meeting, felt stingy.
But this was not a thing to be hurt over.
"Ah, but you do have one properly noble quality. You're a parent in name only, who left a three-year-old alone for five years."
"......So I was a sinner."
Margrave Cain let the bleak words fall and stared into empty air. The look on his face was, in all sincerity, the look of a man who wanted to die, and who knew his own sin.
"...A shame."
If the man had abandoned the child and still played shameless, Lee Han had meant to beat him flat, noble or not, and never mind the rest. But even without Lee Han laying a hand on him, he already wore a face that looked ready to come apart. There was a hint of melancholy in it, too. Leave him like this, and he might well be the sort to take his own life.
"Heh heh. Do stop tormenting our family head. You already know something of the curse, do you not."
"I know. Knowing and this are different things. I'm friends with that kid, and as a friend I have to get angry in her place, or I won't be able to look her in the eye."
"...You seem quite close with our granddaughter."
"Didn't you already know everything?"
"Ghosts are not omnipotent. They can give us only fragments of a tale. If we could know all, this nation's name would long since have been Mordred, not Pendragon."
"Isn't that treason?"
"Did you not know? The last will left by the first Mordred was revolution and rebellion. If the royal house of Pendragon proved incompetent, he said, we were to set the kingdom right by revolution and rebellion whenever the time came."
"......"
"Haha. Don't look at me like that. It is merely a will. We are under no obligation to follow it."
"...Your eyes don't say that."
What showed in the eyes of the old knight, once head of the house, resembled the eyes of a revolutionary Lee Han had only ever seen in photographs. A resolve that said, given the chance, he would turn the country over.
Bad blood with the royal house?
Lee Han judged there might be some ugly trouble between the throne and Mordred, and quietly looked away. Even if they came to blows among themselves, he had no intention of stepping in.
His interest lay elsewhere.
......Thud!
"Something's coming, isn't it?"
"Hm?"
"Pardon?"
They were still parsing his mutter when the order came.
As if he had never been slumped like a man sunk in melancholy, Margrave Cain's voice rang out, charismatic and huge, and the instant the command fell—
The Wave is coming!!
Boil the oil and the water!
Rah! Raaah!
Thud. Thud!
More than six hundred troops stamped as one, and for an instant the ground shook. They dropped into battle readiness as if it were routine, and Lee Han watched them with open admiration. Unlike the others in their urgency, he put a question to Ganok, who was quietly tending his sword.
"Just how many times have you fought?"
"...Hm. I remember clearly through the 1,276th battle. After that I stopped counting, so I couldn't say."
"......"
"The Wave's cycle has grown a little shorter, though. We fought two days ago, and—hah. What a hardship this is, being old."
Ganok grumbled as he spoke, but once the blade was tended, the spirit of a veteran of countless battles rose unmistakable on his face. A spirit that, for a moment, overwhelmed even Lee Han.
And then:
"Care to do a little observing?"
"......"
It sounded like an invitation to a school field trip. Before he quite knew it, Lee Han nodded.
Rrrrrumble—!
Thirty thousand evil spirits surged in like a tidal wave.
...Like a legion of termites.