A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (9)
In a single breath, the advantage of height between Lee Han and Ninshubur reversed twice.
At the start it had been Lee Han looking down out of empty air. Now it was Ninshubur looking down on him.
Not that it helped.
"Awful funny look, for a man staring down his nose."
"......"
"That arm. Doesn't it hurt?"
"......"
"Heh."
"!"
Maybe the sneer at the end grated worse than the words. For the first time a crack ran through Ninshubur's expression, and he opened his mouth.
"Impudent. You seem to think a fluke will carry you forever."
"If it looked like a fluke to you, then that's all the level you've got."
"You talk too much. No warrior at all."
"Yeah? If that's how I look..."
BOOM!!
"Ah. So you do block it."
"......And base, besides."
Mid-sentence he had thrown a bundled five-strike volley of Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox, and yet, astonishingly, Ninshubur turned all five aside with ease.
He had talked on purpose to lure the man off his guard, and the cleanliness of that defense made one thing plain: this was not someone a few words could shake.
Different level from that stray ghost.
Fighting him with messy little tricks was finished. It was time to stop.
And no wonder.
He's actually using that absurd body the way it's meant to be used...
However many blows Lee Han landed, the great evil spirit's body only hurt, and then remained endlessly intact, recovering at a ridiculous speed. He could not even tell whether the thing was flesh or a mass of energy. One fact was certain either way: whatever it was, it was monstrous.
The ghostly aura pouring off it said as much. The total volume of power was nothing Lee Han could scrape against, and if anything in memory came close, it was probably that four-hundred-year-old spell-monger they used to call the Tower Lord. A set of specs that simply should not exist.
And yet the mind inside that cheating body had been no better than a four-year-old's, so the whole of it had been hopelessly unbalanced...
Is this what they mean by the completion of essence, qi, and spirit?
Now the balance had not merely evened out. It felt complete.
Put it this way: a driver who could not tell the brake from the accelerator had been thrashing an F1 car around at random, and at last a racer with the skill and the experience to match the machine had climbed into the seat. A man with real ability, using that cheating divine body—!
Whoosh!
"Let us see how long the impudence lasts."
KRAAANG!
It meant he would show a caliber of skill from another world entirely.
Once again Lee Han was sent flying before he could so much as answer. He had failed to meet the blow, and even as he flew he could not believe it.
I can't see the movement. I can't even feel it?
The strike itself was something he could endure, so there was no panic in it and no real pain, but the astonishment remained all the same. His eyes—no, his senses—had not reacted at all. He had five senses and a sixth rated keener than most beasts, and even those could not answer that speed, that motion, in time.
It isn't simply fast. The movement is so restrained, so endlessly still, that reacting gets harder.
Even the stocks people called masters would not move with a restraint that water-smooth. It could only be a body's function married to technique honed to the extreme. Half in admiration, Lee Han killed his flight, set himself, and looked straight ahead again.
Whoosh—!
"——."
From the instant his gaze faced front, what he saw was a fist, and the fist swallowed his line of sight and came on again—
THOOM!
"......"
"...Blocked it. I did block it."
Lee Han showed a savage grin along with the flippant words.
Ninshubur's blow had landed dead between his brows, and Lee Han had not been sent flying. Waist-core. He had taken the strike on the strength of his lower body and his neck, and the sound it made was the sound of a fist hitting an iron wall.
"...I acknowledge it. You are truly sturdy."
The ancient warrior once called a god of war admitted it: that Lee Han's body was truly sturdy. He had not thought the man could endure his attack, and he was faintly impressed that the blow had been answered in only two tries.
...However.
"And what would you have me do about it—?"
Hwung!
Ninshubur's body leapt.
Fast, exact, so natural that answering it was nearly impossible. Perfect.
Papapapat!
"!?"
"How many of these can you endure?"
Lee Han's eyes twisted without mercy. Two or three he could take, but right now—
"T-ten?"
...how many times had he been hit?
"Twenty, you fool."
KRAAANG!
A kick that called to mind the explosive strength of a camel's leg hammered precisely into Lee Han's abdomen—a blow sharp as an awl, sharp enough to punch straight through the belly.
"...Hm?"
...What Ninshubur had failed to account for was this.
"Ha. Finally landed one."
He had never assumed his opponent would be a madman capable of enduring force that ought to pierce an iron wall, and of turning that very opening into his own chance.
Kkwaak!
The belly, the abdominal wall, seized Ninshubur's foot and would not let go. The way a crocodile, once it has prey in its jaws, does not release it, and in a single motion—
Kwajik—!
—twists it apart.
...Even "swift" was too small a word. It was movement as if the air itself offered no resistance.
I'm not actually a grub...!
Catching it with the eyes was impossible. In the other's eyes, his own movement probably looked slower than a grub's. If he was moving at double speed, that one was at ten. The gap was hopeless.
I can't copy that.
Lee Han had never thought his own movement or his reaction speed slow, but he admitted that matching that was a distant business.
It isn't merely fast. Movement like that is possible because he's polished, for hundreds of years—no, for more than a thousand—the martial art that makes it possible.
It was not an art a human, who barely lives a hundred years, could reach.
Ha. This bastard is incredible.
On skill alone he could have called himself a Mystery of the very highest grade and still fallen short, and though the opponent was a contemptible stray ghost, admiration was all that came out of Lee Han. Which meant that if he played the fool and tried to chase that impossible movement, he would spend the whole day as a sandbag, beaten without end.
So.
I really shouldn't do this often...
Instead of answering the movement, Lee Han chose a strategy that was like him. Endlessly crude, and the most certain. The so-called way of it.
Blood ran.
Bones and organs are fine, at least...
Give the flesh, take the bone. He chose that. He did not prefer it, but he could not stand there and only be hit forever, and he was satisfied enough at having snapped one of the man's legs with his own method that he could smile even with his abdomen torn open and bleeding.
"...Khhm."
It hurt like absolute hell, though.
Lee Han poured half a potion over his belly and drank the rest. Three of them already, and the day was not done; the ordinary daily limit was long behind him. Thanks to having eaten the Ghost King's heart there were still no side effects, but a bitter smile came up on its own.
Because—
Crack, crack!
"...Very well. I will acknowledge it. Technique, experience, and talent far short of mine, overcome and filled in by fighting spirit and venom. Boldness enough that it is no wonder my god named you a Hero."
Unlike his own, supposedly frail self, the opponent was recovering at speed with no potion at all. Ninshubur, knitting back together so fast it was as if the leg had never broken, spoke at length for the first time and gave a slow nod, as if granting recognition.
"Oh, spare me the bullshit."
"In strength and defense alone, you stand above me. The boldness, I grant as well. But..."
Hwung. Whoong!
"—that is all."
"......"
As if repeating the same act, he moved, and in a fraction of an instant poured a machine-gun of blows down on Lee Han.
KWA-KWA-KWANG!!
Heavier than before, and sharper.
KANG!!!
Lee Han got his guard up and simply endured.
Kuuuung—!
He did not go as far as Diamond Body or Unbreakable. Waste Intent, and he would drop where he stood. But enduring had a limit of its own...
Slash!
Wounds were beginning to open. One or two did not matter, but let them multiply and he might as well be a man made of blood. And still he had no way to block the rain, or to answer it. He wanted to use the same method as before, but...
He's wary.
The eyes alone told him. Use the same trick, and it would simply be turned back on him.
Tch. Times like this, I do miss talent.
Even in this instant of spraying blood, Lee Han found himself thinking of the people who, as far as he knew, sat inside the five most talented he had ever seen. Roen. Derek. Iliad. And...
If it were those bastards, they'd have beaten even this without much trouble, wouldn't they?
The hulking brute from the North. If it had been him, he would probably have struggled at first the way Lee Han was struggling, and then, on inborn sense and skill, set himself against that movement. If it had been the mean-eyed spearman, he might have answered with that special eye of his, or with technique.
He hated to admit it, but as far as he knew, real genius meant bastards like those. What others barely reached after ten years of effort—no, after a hundred—they reached in a single day. That was what talent was. The ones called geniuses could not be measured by common sense. What was only ever difficult for ordinary people was, for them, as natural as breathing.
Truly...
—and what am I supposed to do, envying something I already don't have?
Hah!
An envy so empty it was almost funny. He had envied it to death in his previous life, and in the end, hadn't he understood? Compare yourself with others and all that remains is misery, and ugliness. So what he had to do now was not resent the genius other people were born with, or the unfairness of it, and not covet it either.
I have to do what I can do. What the man called Lee Han can do.
The field in which he could say he stood out from other people. Pour his heart's blood into driving that to the extreme!
Wuuung!
What is my advantage?
Monstrous fundamentals, and the tough carcass of a body built on them. And last of all...
A little ingenuity.
Why else had he drilled the basics with the stubbornness of a man digging a single well? Because if the basics alone were trained properly, they became an enormous advantage. And now, after the journey through Wales, those basic abilities had risen another step. So he could do it. He already had the idea, and he had a body sturdy enough, and complete enough, to make the idea real.
Therefore—!
A shrill, endless vibration screamed across the surface of his body.
WIIIIIIIIING!!
There was no reason, anywhere, that he should break.
Slash! Skrrk!
"!?"
......For the first time, Ninshubur's attack was stopped.
...No. More precisely—
"How's that? Lesser version of Body-Guarding Gang Qi, sure, but not bad, right?"
"...Khuk..."
—it had been broken through.
Blood ran!
Ninshubur, god of war, champion of a god, the great warrior of antiquity, dropped to his knees for the first time and cried out in pain. Shaaaaak! Both arms had been sliced to ribbons, a horror past words, and a violent agony crashed over him as if his insides were being shaken to pulp.
"Wh-what did you..."
But more shocking than the agony, more shocking than the wounds on his arms, was that he could not understand what this human had done. Sudden confusion. He whose talent even the god Inanna had favored felt, for the first time, like a fool, and in that instant a sound reached him.
Wiiing!
"A bee's... wingbeat?"
From the man's body, a sound like the wings of a bee.
"You—don't tell me...?!"
"Why?"
"...Madman."
Ninshubur understood. What that man had done. Right now, he was—!
"On the surface of your body, resonance... you raised a ringing! You cannot be so desperate to die that you have lost your mind!"
Why else did they concentrate the phenomenon called Sword Resonance—the crying of a blade—upon a weapon alone? Because the power held in that resonance might collapse the body. Why else had the ringing been handed down from ancient times to the present age as a warrior's greatest secret art? Because it exerted force of that degree. And this bastard had committed that resonance upon the surface of his own body. His skin would be shaved away in the moment, his blood would evaporate, and the frail organs within would burn—!
"...No? I'm fine, though?"
Wiiing.
"......?"
He was not merely fine. He was still raising the ringing. Endlessly even.
"????"
Unless the vessels, the tendons, the nerves, and every organ in him were made of metal, it was a phenomenon that could not be possible. Ninshubur felt common sense sway under him, and dizziness with it, because he could not understand why it worked.
But the man who had done the impossible showed him an unhurried step, and spoke.
"And what's this 'ringing'? How rustic. This technique doesn't have some outdated name like that."
"—Repulsion Qigong. Call it that."
He said it as if the thing were nothing more than one challenge flung at the impossible: the sort a humanity that might one day leave its footprints on the moon would attempt.