The Knights and a Night of Bonfires (5)
The three men's "quarrel"—a conversation carried on in flesh—went on for some time, until at a certain point it changed.
Thud!
"...Hoh."
"......"
"Heh heh. Far more pleasant than fighting whatever that god of war was supposed to be."
Their quarrel had begun to turn out, again and again, a draw.
It was no longer only when they fought one against one. Even two against one, the result had started coming up even.
Two of them could drive Lee Han back and still fail to overwhelm him. Turn the same pairing on Rak, and the other two, moving in concert, could not overwhelm him either. Set them both on Maximus, and they could not overwhelm him any more than that.
It was not a mistake born of clumsy coordination. Each of them was so accomplished that not one could be ranked above the others, and each had the toughness, and the uncanny adaptability, to endure even when two came at once. A few exchanges were enough. From then on, none of them could be certain of crushing either of the others.
Had they truly set out to pin someone down—had they been ready to kill or be killed—they might have forced a victory one way or another. But they were not fighting. They were only "talking."
And so.
"Feels like I've turned into a bear doing tricks."
"Let us stop."
"The fun was only just getting started. We end it like this?"
Their quarrel, and their conversation, ended in a single instant, as abruptly as it had begun.
Pat-pat-pat...!
The three men shook themselves, and sweat poured off them like rain. It was a rare sight. Men with stamina like steel had worked up that much sweat from barely an hour of breathless sparring. They were not tired because they had moved so little. They had spent more than ten times the usual stamina fretting over the control of their strength. Lose the tension for a single instant, and instinct would have thrown a blow at full power.
They knew well enough that hot blood might surge, and so they had done everything they could to hold one another down. Get serious for no good reason, and—
Then one of the three dies. No question.
Whoever it was would be leaving for Avalon that very day. Their strength was that evenly matched, and that lethal.
And Lee Han, having faced monsters like these with his own hands, understood it the moment their fists met.
These bastards really did awaken Intent.
They, too, had broken the shell. They had opened that new realm called Intent, and each of them had honed it so keenly he could have called himself extraordinary without blushing.
Figures. That's why they overwhelmed Ninshubur.
Set his old experience of fighting them beside the clash just now, and Lee Han thought he could guess what manner of Intent they had touched.
Truly....
"You lot picked some viciously difficult roads."
Roads, he suspected, not unlike his own.
"What do you mean?"
"Hm?"
"You're trying to become perfect, and you, sir—you've erased the limit line? Whichever it is, that's no normal Intent."
"...Sharp, at times like this."
"So you saw through it."
Both men understood what those words meant. Their eyes widened, just slightly, the way a man shows a mild surprise. Lee Han only snorted at the reaction.
"How would I not know."
They had shown it outright. He could hardly have missed it.
Rak de Duron was probably the most balanced knight Lee Han knew. A knight without a single lack anywhere. Talent where talent was wanted, effort where effort was wanted. Technique and physical ability alike laid out in perfect balance—an all-master. And because he knew that advantage better than anyone, he was trying to become perfect. More perfect than anyone alive.
So if Lee Han had to define what Rak's Intent was, he would have put it like this.
An Intent only a man granted talent by heaven—talent enough to make sport even of heaven—could aim for.
And that gentleman, on the other hand...
Maximus. A knight possessed of a physique so staggering it was one in ten million—no, perhaps one in a hundred million. The only man who had ever made Lee Han feel inferior in the flesh. A Hercules, a Xiang Yu, walking around in the real world. Had there been no such realm as an Aura User, he would have been a man one might call a Superhuman and be done with it.
And yet that man, born with a body heaven itself had bestowed, was not satisfied with what he had. He was driving himself harder still. Flawless flesh from the moment of his birth, and he looked up at it and found it wanting. It was greed past all reason—but it also touched the paradox that says there is no completeness in the world.
Literally.
An Intent that refused the close of one's growing years and demanded still to grow, in a world where such a thing as completeness did not exist.
...And they say the ones who already have it are the worst.
Meeting the Intents those two meant to reach, Lee Han could only think there were no greedier men alive. They magnified the advantages they already possessed and looked past even those, and the Intents in question were permitted only to people born with so much.
"Sickening bastards."
In the end he clicked his tongue. Imagine the martial might they would show once those Intents were complete, and the skin crawled.
...But at that reaction of his—
"......Not something the likes of you should say."
"Hardly words meant for us, wouldn't you say?"
The two men made no effort to hide their displeasure. They looked at him as if to ask where he had gone and sold his conscience.
"What did I do?"
"Your Intent is the kind that neither breaks nor collapses, is it not?"
"From what I saw, even the organs, the vessels, the blood itself cannot be destroyed. Attacks from within do not reach you either. In truth, you have taken a step outside the human species."
"Oh, give me a break. This is the conscientious version. What's the big deal."
"......"
"......"
Unbreakable. That was the name of the Intent Lee Han had reached, and at most it was nothing more than an Intent that established the concept of not breaking. The Sword Duke had pinned the grandiose name Unbreakable on it, but the name was the only impressive part. Honestly, there was nothing special about it. He had simply gotten a little harder. What great meaning was there in that?
"...Now that I look, you scoundrel sold your conscience to a goblin."
"Even the outland tribes of the North seem less shameless than you."
"??"
...Why?
Does this bastard not even know what Intent he's touched?
An Intent that collapses Mystery itself.
Just as Lee Han had read their Intent by meeting their fists, the two men, in facing him, had been given the chance to learn his in detail. No—they could not have failed to know it from the start.
My own fist hurts from hitting him.
Even technique doesn't work?
Unbreakable, was it? That Intent, quite literally, erased every human weak point. Even the vital spots and the joints a human being ought to have felt as if they had vanished altogether. More than that, he had turned the crushing Mystery of the Heavenly Bull back on itself and broken it down. Judging by that, not even germs or poison could threaten him.
...If things went well, he might even beat cancer cells.
The flesh did not collapse, and it did not break. That, in turn, produced the paradox that nothing worked on him. They would have wagered it. If his Intent was a cut above theirs, so be it—but it was certainly not beneath them.
He overcame even Mystery. Curses and magic won't reach him either.
Something like that... I couldn't do it.
An Intent of unmatched simplicity, and precisely because it was simple, it was harder. Every precondition required to give rise to it was absurd.
Through the art of the Diamond Body, one had to be able to raise the hardness of the flesh until it matched steel. Through the Fairy's Blessing, one had to possess a body without a speck of impurity. And tempering—that meant experiencing being broken and shattered tens of thousands of times over.
Which was to say—
How is he alive?
Not a pureblood human at all, then. Half-troll? Ogre? ...Hmm. I thought Half-Blood was only a legend.
Simple enough. But the road to that simple process was so harsh that dying along it would not have been strange in the least. And so, to the two of them, Lee Han did not look like a human being. He looked like a zombie, or like a Half-Blood out of legend. If he were anything else, it made no sense.
And so today, with no one the wiser, the System Window boy's mutant hypothesis quietly claimed one win.
Gurgle....
A forest, exactly sixty-three miles—about a hundred kilometers—from Wales.
Wales, blessing victory and homecoming, had not let its lights die all through the night. This forest was the opposite. An eerie air hung over it, and though the sun had not yet set, the place was black as pitch. Then, as if to break that low, hushed mood, the ground itself heaved, moving in a way that was somehow wrong.
It looked like the water-blisters that sometimes rise in a lawn when water pools under the turf—except these had appeared all at once, and the blisters gurgled and shifted. At a glance, the sight called to mind a caterpillar's cocoon, making ready for something like a butterfly to emerge.
And sure enough.
Rip!
An arm thrust out of the gurgling turf-blister—no, out of the turf's cocoon.
Riiip!
A person's arm.
Once the arm was out, the rest was easy. The other arm showed itself in turn, and then the head and the lower body slowly worked free of the cocoon.
"Pwah!"
Yes. What came out of the cocoon was a person.
"Kehek—kaahek! Wh-why did those damned shamans have to plant a spare body in a place like this? Vicious, the lot of them, honestly..."
The woman spoke as if the whole business disgusted her, and she kept vomiting reagent. The great mass of fluid that had wrapped the spare body was foul beyond belief. Foul enough that the retching came one wave after another.
But a moment later—
"Hoo.... Still. I lived."
The woman grinned, her crimson eyes gleaming. The process of resurrection had been unpleasant, but what mattered was that she had survived, wasn't it?
Hum!
Clothes formed over a body that had been naked a moment before. More precisely, they were clothes made by stealing the blood of beasts from the nearby woods, so the feel of them was a little off.
"Better than naked."
She kept muttering to herself, and that, too, was an important process. Part of it was to confirm the soul had seated properly. Part of it was that if she did not keep speaking, the soul might be contaminated. Of course, a vampire of her high standing should not particularly have needed any such process.
Because it might be dangerous anyway.
This spare body had been made from her own blood, yes. Even so, she could not deny that shamans and black mages had had a hand in it.
Torn Wing. No telling what tricks those sinister schemers might pull. Have to be careful.
Surprisingly intent on looking after the safety of her own body, she—no, the former male—let out a sneer.
"...Sorry."
"I said I was sorry."
At some moment a beast made of shadow was standing before the vampire Hansel, and through the beast's mouth came a reproach that was not a reproach. Hansel's brow creased of its own accord. Gloomy as ever, that one.
"If you're that disappointed, you could've helped. Why send me alone?"
"Right? I didn't get beaten for nothing!"
Hansel threw her chest out, as if to say her defeat had been only natural. As if she had nothing to be ashamed of.
Looking at that proud Hansel, the shadow let out a low sound of displeasure. And yet....
A shame.
It still could not hide the regret. And how could it? Where, now, were they to find a demon already rare in the South? A high-ranking one, at that.
With the temple destroyed, the power of a high demon alone might have brought the kingdom down in a single stroke.
The temple had fallen into corruption. Even so, the power of Holy Law it held had not itself been corrupted. Rather, when an evil being descended, Holy Law showed an absolute authority. But now the high priests capable of wielding high Holy Law had been purged in great numbers after the recent incident, and because of that the South had, in effect, lost its means of opposing demons.
So they had meant to take a high demon in hand and invade the kingdom at a stroke....
Failed again.
Having failed even this far, the shadow felt almost wronged. They had prepared so much. They had poured in devotion without measure, and still all of it had failed. Not feeling wronged would have been the stranger thing.
Is this the will of Radiance?
The South's one god, the Light of Radiance. At the unpleasant sense that the Light of Radiance was obstructing them at every turn, the shadow's brow furrowed of its own accord.
Then Hansel, who had been examining and observing her spare body, cried out.
"Ah, right! First Apostle! I've got something to report!"
"Yeah! Not something else—I saw that kid!"
"That kid! The one with the body you had your eye on, First Apostle! That kid's alive!"
"Yes, No. 8! That kid's alive! Got insanely strong, that kid!"
"First Apostle?"
The shadow's true body shuddered. To think he was alive....
I thought he had less than ten years of life left. And he is still alive?
Unlike the other test subjects—the Original, subjected to experiment in the most primitive way of all! A body that, being pure, had held an ability even the shadow had coveted. And later, upon learning that its lifespan would run out before it ever passed its twenties, how disappointed he had been.
And yet....
Alive? Even past his twenties?!
That meant—
"Huh?"
"???"
The shadow's regret over failing to capture the high demon vanished in an instant. And well it might.
"......Uh. Huh?"
"Ah, no, it's just—that kid got a bit stronger..."
"Ah, no..."
Whoosh.
"......"
And so the shadow vanished, having said only what it meant to say. Left alone, Hansel blinked.
And then—
"...Uh. Did I say that for nothing?"
Hansel felt a sudden pang of regret. She had the feeling she had chosen the wrong words.
Not a little...
Shouldn't I have added it—that the kid was a bit seriously strong...?