What Cause Does a Knight Have to Fight? (9)
What would a man do if a giant termite came at him at fifty kilometers an hour, a thing that had to weigh well over sixty kilos?
And if there were thirty thousand of them, every skull packed with saw-teeth that belonged on a shark?
Ordinarily, the answer was simple.
Run.
Their shells were hard to begin with, and they were enormous besides. Give them an average speed of fifty kilometers an hour and a sprint of seventy, and a human being—skin and meat and nothing more—would fly apart on impact. No ordinary castle wall would hold against a charge like that. They were a legion that could wipe a city from the earth before half a day was gone. Someone, somewhere, ought to have been shaking hard enough to go dizzy. And yet—
"Not a bad number today, all things considered."
"The locusts last time were worse."
"When a million of them poured in, I truly thought the world was ending."
"Spare me the theatrics! When I was young, three billion grasshoppers once filled the sky over the kingdom, you brats!"
"Oh, don't lie."
"I said it happened, and it happened!"
There was not a trace of fear on the soldiers' faces—no. On the warriors' faces. What was written there was an easy set of the mouth, and eyes carrying just the right edge of tension. Battle-hardened veterans. The name rose of its own accord before the bearing of Mordred's warriors, and the man who led them had already lifted a banner worn thin with age.
A white field, a black shield, a ghost's face. Today, as on every other day, that banner rode in the Margrave's hand and stood as a landmark for every warrior on the line.
"Aim!"
Metal clacked. Guns, cannon, and one enormous piece of a strange make swung toward the onrushing host, iron groaning as they settled on their aim. The monsters closed, and closed faster, and still the banner held high gave no signal. Wait. A little longer.
The ground shuddered. The nearer the host came, the more its weight and momentum crushed down on the body, and a wind rose thick with dust. Tension climbed with the pressure, and the pressure climbed with the charge, until—
"Fire!!!"
The banner slashed down. Guns and cannon vomited fire in the same breath, and that strangely shaped great gun—
The great gun poured out Flame.
A vast sheet of fire swept the foremost monsters and every rank behind them. Bullets and shells struck true in the flame's wake, and while the cannon hurried to reload, the archers never ceased. Shaft after shaft went out without a pause.
Already softened by fire, shell, and shot, the monsters took arrows by the hundreds. Skulls punched through, they died where they fell.
Keaaaa!!!
Some still came on through arrow and gun alike. Then the fire leapt.
!!?
The speed at which that savage flame—close kin to Greek fire—caught from body to body was hideous. Monster after monster burned down inside it.
Even so, there was a limit to how much punishment a barrage could deal. The beasts that had endured every trial named so far finally drove at the palisade, meaning to smash through.
A wet chop.
"Monsters? Here?"
When had they come down? The White Ghosts had dropped beneath the stakes. A murderous presence rolled off them as they butchered the charge where it stood.
The monsters that flung themselves at the knights had every reason to be badly confused. They came on like hurled shot and destroyed themselves on their own speed, while the knights stood perfectly unharmed.
??
"You think you can pierce our defense?!"
The knights jeered at them. A White Ghost's armor was not merely grotesque. It was stout, yes, and it carried a vicious repulsion against physical blows—as if someone had copied, trait for trait, what a ghost-type monster possessed. So it did not matter how fast a monster was, or how hard. None of it reached them. The armor they wore was at once the strongest shield and a club.
"In your next life, never set your sights on Mordred."
Bone crunched.
"The lads are in high spirits today."
"?"
"Ah, I mean it kindly. Only the day before yesterday they fought as if their souls had gone out of them—duty, and nothing else. Look at them now. Lively, aren't they? Your letter must have put the strength back in them. Though I'll say this: because of it, every last one of them is squandering stamina something fierce."
"So that's what you meant."
No wonder the fighting had felt strangely exaggerated. Were they performing? Not that the situation itself was theater. The soldiers and the knights were fighting like madmen, and the monsters were dying in the most hollow fashion—but from the monsters' side, it had to be enough to drive a creature out of its mind. They were not weak. It was only that—
These men's fighting is too seasoned, and too refined. That's the problem.
It had the hand of an old farmer harvesting grain he himself had raised. A one-sided slaughter. How many battles, repeated and repeated, did it take before men grew this practiced? When it came to fighting monsters, was there any force anywhere that fought better than these?
Did they develop the weapons themselves?
What impressed him even more was the quality of the arms.
Fight long enough, and the weapons evolve with you.
Lee Han had been to war. He had seen a fair number of weapons, and he knew perfectly well how feeble guns and cannon usually were. Yet the firepower before him now plainly outclassed the royal army's ordnance. Especially—
How did they even make a thing like that?
A weapon that breathed fire. And not ordinary fire. The flames kept catching and spreading like napalm, while some vicious toxin sapped the monsters further still.
"I can feel a fairly strong poison in that. Are you sure it's all right?"
"No need to worry, if they are knights. Soulsteel Armor turns aside all but the worst toxins and curses."
"Oh."
"Soulsteel Armor is the sum of everything Mordred is. A function of that order is only to be expected. Ah—don't go too close. You could be poisoned."
"Don't trouble yourself. I can digest most deadly poisons."
"...?"
"This isn't even deadly. More of a sharp tang."
"I-is that so? Remarkable. I had thought that lad was the only one with resistance of that order...."
A heavy thud rolled across the field, as if the man in question had heard his own name and chosen that moment to announce himself.
"Hrrraaaagh!!"
Asking who was contributing the most in this battle was honestly meaningless. But if the question were who was performing not a great feat, but an enormous one, the answer could be given without hesitation. That man.
Felix. Plate had made his already massive body larger still, and every time the huge iron maces in his two hands moved, they showed in the flesh what it meant for strength to pass overwhelming and become simply violent. Monsters fell wherever the maces went. Dozens rushed him, and with each swing two or three were crushed together and burst apart. Butcher was the word that fit.
And then—
"Uwaaaaah!"
"Vice-Captain! You mustn't charge off alone like that!"
"Felix! That madman, again...?!"
The more monster blood he saw, the stronger his momentum grew. He answered a charging beast by charging right back—the very summit of brute stupidity. It would not have been too much to call it suicide. Neither Lee Han nor Ganok looked particularly worried. And for good reason. What was being pulverized was obviously not Felix, but the monsters sprinting in.
In under five minutes he had crushed more than three hundred, and he hurled himself at them again as if hunting the next thing to break.
Mordred's fighting dog. An epithet like that could only have been born of that relentlessness, and that excess.
"Setting the poison aside—isn't that fire hot?"
"He is of Mordred blood. A Guardian Spirit is bound to him, so he can move for about ten minutes even in the heart of a conflagration. Ah, and that is a secret. If word of the Guardian Spirit got out, they would raise hell trying to tear it free."
"...You've had a hard time of it."
"......What grieves me is that I cannot say you are wrong."
Ganok said as much, and set his helm on his head.
"Wait a moment, then. I'll go lend that fool a hand."
"Go on."
"Heh heh. Not even a word of worry? No offer of help?"
"This isn't my battlefield. It's yours."
"......"
The answer caught Ganok off guard. His eyes went round—not because it felt cold. Rather—
It was not pity. It was full of respect for them, and that pleased him. The corner of Ganok's mouth lifted, and he went straight for the line, nothing but delighted.
Something crashed below.
"...Spry enough to take a new wife."
It was not quite admiration that Lee Han let fall toward the old knight dropping straight off a palisade eight stories high. Then he felt someone drawing up beside him, and he quietly yielded the place.
"You here because you're worried about your father?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Father is the strongest knight in Mordred. Even I cannot beat him yet."
"Then what's the commander doing up here?"
"Once Father has joined the fight, the battle is over. So I came to finish the question I did not get to ask."
"Does it have to be now?"
"Time ought to be used efficiently."
A soft hiss. Cain, the Margrave, lit a cigarette with a practiced hand and set it between his lips. Smoke left him in a long breath.
"I don't smoke."
"Sorry about that. Don't worry—this one is rolled from medicinal herbs."
"You sick somewhere?"
"I would sooner the ailment were of the body."
"?"
"Yes. If I must name the place that hurts, call it the heart. Strange as that must sound."
"......"
It was a strange sight. Out in front the monsters were still burning, and knights and soldiers were still killing them. No one would have grudged it the name of a great victory. For a commander, it ought to have lifted the chest. The Margrave looked entirely unmoved. If anything, he only seemed more like a man fighting because the fight was his duty.
Then—
"How much do you know?"
"?"
"About us. I am asking how much you know."
The Margrave fixed him with a sharp look. The languid man of a moment ago was gone. What poured off him now was spirit enough to recall a great beast stretching after sleep. However his strength might flag, a beast remained a beast for a reason. This, Lee Han thought, was probably the essence of the man called Cain.
"How much, he says...."
Lee Han did not shrink under that gaze. He put on a lukewarm face, because he could guess well enough why the question had been asked.
Sounding me out?
Suspicious, no doubt. Wondering what he had come here for. It might have been the chronic suspicion peculiar to nobles, but Lee Han did not find that strange. If the man were not suspicious, that would have been the strange thing. So he decided to give an answer that was truly honest.
"Mm. Not all that much...."
"There's a thing sealed here called the Great Demon, and because of a curse that bastard laid down ages ago, everyone in Wales is cursed to die. About that much?"
"And I know you're fighting without rest in this Hidden Grotto to slow the Great Demon's curse—and that it's no better than pouring water on a broken dike."
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"...Ah, no. ...You simply know far too much."
"?"
"Ahem."
When the other party knew one's secrets too well, it was the one who had asked who was left embarrassed.