A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (6)
A wind rose. No—a typhoon.
It had been compressed without limit, and yet its force could stand beside a cyclone. When that typhoon burst like an explosion and swallowed every direction at once, even the word disaster felt hopelessly thin.
Heaven's punishment. That, and nothing lesser, seemed the only fitting name. People folded low and braced, fighting not to be swept away.
Whoooooosh—!
Someone swallowed, dry. Had the blast not gone off several hundred meters out, Mordred's fortress would long since have been torn into the sky, and the soldiers with it—flung aloft, then dropped straight out of the world of the living.
No. Sooner than that, the supersonic knives of wind screaming off the explosion would have shredded their bodies where they stood.
And there was proof the guess was right.
A heavy thud. A dry, whispering collapse. More than twenty thousand wraiths were caught in the same gale and erased. It ought to have been pure satisfaction. Instead it left the guts cold.
And at the center of that exploding typhoon—still as the eye of a storm—a monstrous noise came again and again. Bone breaking. No: bone warping. A hideous sound that hurt just to hear.
Another swallow. Human and monster alike had been stunned quiet by the blast, and in that quiet the noise rang obscenely clear in the ear, until a voice pushed through the settling dust.
"Goddamn it, I mean it. Use Bone-Compression Art and Reverse Circulation Art at the same time again and I'm not a human being. Do it one more time and my body really will blow apart."
Between the dying veils of dust, a huge man revealed himself by degrees, blue eyes burning.
Joints cracked back into place.
"......Ah."
The sound slipped out among the soldiers. Even at a distance the man's outline was plain, and they had marveled before they knew they were doing it.
"Perfect...."
The knight who bore the name Fighting Dog—more serious about tempering flesh than any of them—let the verdict out without meaning to. This was no moment for such talk. He simply could not swallow the shock and the awe.
How does a body like that even exist? In bulk and in height the man was slight beside him. But to call that slight would be a mistake.
Compression. Yes—that flesh had been compressed to an astonishing degree, every useless muscle pared away, until it seemed he was looking at a body cut from diamond. And if it also called steel to mind, it was because not a speck of impurity showed in the toughness, only the trace of long forging: a thing completed at the end of untold hours of effort and training.
How much work—no, what impossible thing do you have to do to own a body like that? Even he, born with what people praised as a giant's frame, would not have trusted himself to build one. Training past all common sense. No—a body smelted the way metal is smelted, finished through fights that stepped over death. Talent and effort could not reach a realm like that.
And so the Fighting Dog, Felix Mordred, gave a heavy nod. He had wondered how anyone could raise a typhoon's explosion that defied reason.
This man can. No—if he couldn't manage even this, it wouldn't be right.
For the first time in his life, Felix felt inferiority, a deep stir of being moved, and defeat before another person. A being set above him: one he could not surpass as he stood. And yet it was not a base inferiority, nor a humiliating defeat.
Rather the opposite.
He had learned that such a height of training existed. A pleasant defeat, if ever there was one, and Felix's will to fight caught fire.
"...What the hell is that lunatic saying, in the middle of this?"
The booming voice carried even from afar. He clicked his tongue. A strange man, as always.
There was only one reason Lee Han had not yet released Bone-Compression Art and Reverse Circulation Art.
Nothing else.
Let this go just anywhere, and somebody's going to die.
He was afraid of the collateral. Was it because he had unfolded both arts at once, the first time he had ever used either? An unforeseen side effect had come of it, and only four days after he became Santa Rihan did he understand how savage the rebound was—the force of a body trying to return to its original shape, fiercer by far than he had imagined.
A rebound that violent meant the shock of release would be just as violent. Loose it without thinking, and—
This could flatten a building without even trying.
A living bomb. That was the side effect his body carried. The trouble was that even after the rebound had piled up until it rivaled a bomb, he had neither the space nor the time to spend it, and because of that the force only kept accumulating.
Ironically, most knights saddled with a rebound like this would have lost control, or had their flesh collapse, long before they endured it. Lee Han's body was simply too hardy. He had already possessed a frame to rival steel, and after consuming the Heart of the Ghost King and receiving the Fairy's Blessing besides, the vessel of that body passed beyond comprehension. An Aura User himself had marveled at it. What more was there to say?
And so he succeeded in holding down a rebound that common sense said could not be held. For dozens of days.
No. This is not how this is supposed to go....
Crushing it for dozens of days had never been his will, of course. It was nothing but a ridiculous accident, because the world around him refused to leave him a spare moment. The war to unify Wales. The sudden appearance of the wraiths. On top of that, the urgent need to make for the Mordred Secret Grotto. And the situation only grew worse: the violent movement and the fighting themselves fed the rebound and swelled it further.
It had already been enough to bring a building down. Now he could no longer even guess what scale of force the release would throw off, and so he had to clamp his mind shut and keep the arts from coming undone by sheer force of will.
It was an ordeal of endurance only a man whose body had reached Diamond Indestructible Body could have borne. And now, with that rebound finally loose—
"...Tell me to do it again, and I couldn't."
The ground rolled with the aftermath of what he himself had made, and he could only click his tongue.
Not a second time. I mean it. Powerful, yes. But it took too much time, and the things that had to be stored and tended were more than one or two. More than that—
Two more tries—no, three—and this body collapses.
A body's durability was not infinite. A bitter smile was only natural. He had done something that would have made even a barbarian click his tongue. Honestly.
...Even so.
"The result's good, so it's fine, isn't it?"
Lee Han looked over surroundings scoured perfectly clean and put on a pleased face, as if he had never grimaced at all. Monster and evil spirit alike, erased. A wide, refreshing stretch of nothing.
This, now—this was the satisfaction of watching years of burnt grease scraped off an iron plate.
Iiihiiing!
"...You've got tact, I'll give you that."
A gift arrived, as if in consideration of Lee Han, whose clothes and armor had been torn to shreds. The margrave's mount—Cain's Ghost Horse—passed him a bundle, and as he pulled on the clothes and armor it offered, he climbed out of looking like a beggar.
Metal clicked and locked. There was more than clothing: water, field rations, an axe, and a sword. Confirming each piece, he unhurriedly tore the rations open.
Slowly. Endlessly slowly.
......
......
Monsters still lay scattered far off, yet even in the middle of that battlefield he was nothing but at ease. He went further—hung sword and axe at his hip, filled his belly with dried fruit, meat, and bread, and drank water besides—and still the monsters did not charge.
They flinched.
...Or, to be precise, they could not even form the thought of charging. Whenever he moved as if he might do something, they jerked and scrambled backward, and that was as far as they got. It was not a reaction a monster showed toward a human. Had humans stood there in their place, the reaction would have been the same.
And no wonder.
The presence he gave off as naturally as breath was crushing the things called evil.
"Figures.... That wasn't enough to kill you."
"......"
"Replenishing water and protein is more productive than talking to the likes of you."
He did not stop working his jaw, chewing every mouthful down to nothing, and at the end he drank water and a potion both, finishing even the resupply of his stamina before he loosened his body with a light stretch. His joints were still stiff, and after dozens of days it felt a little strange to be back in his original shape.
"...Light."
His body was lighter than it had ever been, and brimming with strength. This was no mere placebo. Enduring the rebound had amounted, without his intending it, to dozens of days of weighted training, and his physical ability might well have climbed past what it had been. Nothing exact—somewhere around double, perhaps triple.
Whatever the increase, what mattered was this.
"You not running?"
A sharp breath, and his will turned on the enemy. What mattered was erasing that stray ghost. A blade-wind rose. Not the speed-of-sound blades he had shown a moment ago; even so, the heavy, hammer-like momentum was pressure enough, all on its own, to bear down on a foe.
The Great Evil Spirit, which had waited with surprising patience, curled a sneer around the question. Something creaked and clicked behind it.
Contemptuous arrogance on full display, the empty air behind the Great Evil Spirit began to ripple in wave-patterns, and something started to be called forth.
The creaking swelled into a shriek of joints.
The Great Evil Spirit loved beautiful humans. Those who were not beautiful—those who were ugly—it despised, and thought lower than livestock.
And so.
It meant to make the impious human who had ignored its consideration pay for the sin—
WHAM!
—and before the sentence could finish, the Great Evil Spirit's head snapped around.
And how.
Truly, hideously.
"You were going to teach me my place?"
"Then why are you doing that?"
Thud!
CRACK!
"I said try it."
Lee Han asked it again, smiling. If it was going to teach him his place, then why—
"are you rolling around on the ground?"
Like a bug that had eaten insecticide.
Bone crunched. The Great Evil Spirit's face caved in, and it became exactly what it had so despised.
BOOM!
...An ugly ruin of a face.