Cowardice Is Not the Villain's Exclusive Right (2)
No one there could truly catch his movements. They did not even know when, or how, he had closed on Roseth. The Half-Fiends, rather than cry out or stoke their fury over the harm done to their master, only lunged forward and drew steel, the sound of it a thin hiss.
It was movement of the purest stealth. The armor they wore was the pure-white plate that marked a Holy Knight, and yet the motion itself called to mind the Assassins of the West. Silent to that degree—and still the tricks that followed were flagrant in their cowardice.
They made as if to swing their swords, only to fling poison-smeared daggers and needles, and a few even pulled guns and fired without a moment's hesitation. It was plain they meant to use any means and any method. The blows pouring in on him sealed every direction in a full circle. There should not have been a gap left to slip through.
Kra-crack!
“!?”
He broke straight through, as if he had not the slightest interest in whatever was being thrown at him.
It was a sight to make one doubt his sanity. Every hidden weapon that touched him rebounded, and even the blade that met the point between his brows shattered the other way. By the time they witnessed that and guessed something had gone wrong, it was already too late.
“—That armor of yours tough?”
His hand was already reaching.
Crunch!
Plate that sheathed the man from crown to sole was pierced by a bare hand. He drove through armor and collarbone together, and in that same instant—
“Gyaaaaaah!”
—some unknowable force sank in and brought the Half-Fiend down.
The Half-Fiend, whom they had taken for an emotionless doll, writhed in agony and collapsed. And then, at a certain moment, still clad in that armor, the body began to twist and compress with no regard for its own will. Crack. Crunch. Grind. It turned in directions a body must never turn, and bone and flesh were crushed together. The armor bit into that bone and flesh and, like a weld, kept the body from ever returning to its proper shape. The next moment—
“Ta-da.”
Thud!
He spread his hands in a playful flourish, as if showing off a piece he had made, and tapped the round sphere. What had once been a Half-Fiend, and was now something like an iron ball.
“I've been using Reverse Circulation Art and Bone-Compression Art a lot lately, so I picked up the knack. Means I can shove my strength into a man's body, compress it, and twist it. Well, if you want it this round, you also need Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation, and a decent understanding of bone—and as it happens, I meet every one of those conditions. Haha.”
“……”
“Who wants to be next? If you've got a shape in mind, say so. Doesn't have to be a sphere. Square, triangle—I'll make you into whatever you want.”
“……gulp.”
From somewhere came the dry sound of a throat working. Half-Fiends who knew no fear, who carried out any cruelty at their lord's command and were thought to possess no emotions at all, felt the thing called fear stir back to life. Seized by the sense that they must not dare approach that, they even wanted to step away. But—
Shlick!
“—From this moment, any coward who takes a step back dies by my hand. Know that.”
“……”
“Pathetic wretches. Afraid of a nobody like that! What is he even supposed to be!”
Huuuuuk!
Pouring out a ferocious pressure, Roseth took a Half-Fiend's head in a single stroke, and his eyes lit with a baleful gleam. His own teeth had been torn out, and blood still poured without mercy from his mouth, but his momentum was no less fierce for it. It was the bearing of a chieftain who held a place among the great nobles, and the moment that made plain he was a man of considerable skill. A bastard sword of alien shape, the equal of a greatsword, rested in one hand as he leveled the blade at the opponent who went by the unfunny name of Santa Rihan.
“…I see it now. You. You are the one who has been throwing Loengrin's name around so freely of late. I thought it strange that not one of the assassins we sent ever came back. There was reason enough.”
Roseth was a man with no small number of flaws in his character, and yet he still possessed the judgment and the mind befitting the head of a house. So he caught, in an instant, that Santa Rihan was the very man who had been grating on Loengrin all this while, and laughed with a savage edge.
“Insolent wretch. Your confidence in your own strength is excessive. Wipe out a handful of assassins, and you take Loengrin for a joke? The likes of you—”
“It isn't Loengrin that's the joke. It's you.”
“……”
“You're the easy one. You sorry excuse for a man.”
“…If that was meant as provocation, you have done well enou—”
“Not provocation. The truth. Now that I'm looking you in the face, I get it. Of everyone I've ever seen, you are the most arrogant idiot. Arrogant, and without the ability to match it—you just live drunk on how great you think you are. Spell-slingers wear that look all the time. The spitting image. Completely.”
“……”
He sneered, and he meant it. That he had walked into a great noble's mansion this easily was the proof. He had looked into the shape of Roseth's character, provoked him in the open, and delivered the letter—and then the man had gone and let him inside. He had nearly laughed at the sight. Any other great noble, no, anyone worthy of being called a distinguished house, would never have allowed it. They would have ignored him, or sent someone to deliver a reprimand. Roseth had not. He had drawn him into the mansion and carried it all the way to a face-to-face meeting. Arrogance past the point of folly.
Simon said it, didn't he. Drove out every loyal subordinate who offered honest counsel, for the single reason that it grated on him.
And what was honest counsel? It was a subordinate looking at a thing and thinking, ah, this isn't quite right, and saying so. He fired them because that grated? Put it in the terms of a company, and it was nothing other than a firm that had sacked every capable hand and kept only the strange ones. In that sense, the man was an idiot. A bigger one than the spell-slingers.
“Good thing I'm not the sort of moron who loses to an idiot.”
“You truly have no restraint with that mouth.”
Huuuk!
Roseth's sword traced a rough circle, as if to give his displeasure a shape, and the massive blade came down on him all at once—
Crack!
“…!”
“You haven't had a proper fight in the last ten years, have you? That's why you're so dull. So slow.”
“H-how could a wretch like you…”
“I knew it.”
Before the other man could even register his shock—a sword not cut, but broken clean in half—he was already sneering, flicking up one shattered half with the toe of his foot.
“I'll finish this fast. I've got somewhere to be tonight.”
He fired it off as if kicking a ball.
It ran Roseth through.
Thud!
Strength gets cut in half, but the speed goes double-time in exchange? That's rich, too.
Lee Han—disguised as Santa Rihan, no, transformed into him—felt himself growing used to fighting in this shape, and let out a short, dry laugh. Call it the beginning of learning how to fight in a body that had been pared thin. A fresh sensation.
Bang!
There was plenty to grate on him, strength among the rest. But once he endured even that irritation, he could see it plain: the fineness of his technique was growing.
For instance.
Huuuk!
He poured the turn of his waist, his legs, and his shoulders straight into a fist and let it fly. Speed made up for the strength he lacked, and the blow that came forth carried sharpness in place of heft. The instant it struck the man's flank dead on—
Thukk!
—it punched through the armor and ran on through rib and organs alike.
“Uwaaaah!”
A Half-Fiend charged with a shout, as if in fury at the sight of a comrade going down. Lee Han drove in to meet him and, for the first time in a while, laid a technique on the man—a joint lock that hauled the bone free with a clean, satisfying crack. In the same motion he kicked the leg out from under him, dropped him, and snapped his neck. The opponent went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Anyone who saw it would have taken it for nothing more than a play with its beats perfectly set. It was not even a play. For the Half-Fiends, it was only a death match with their lives staked on it. And yet, if it still looked like a play, that would only be because—
“What, it's over already?”
—he was simply that overwhelmingly strong. Strong enough to make sport of them.
Dozens of Half-Fiends lay tumbled across the floor. Only Lee Han still stood on his own two legs.
And—
“Keh. Kehuk. Keheok!”
Only Roseth, hacking without end, his belly run through and his body driven into the wall, still held on to his senses. A great blade was buried in his stomach, and he could not even draw it out. By some fortune it had missed the heart and the other vital organs, so he was barely alive, though he bled so badly it would not have been strange for him to die at any moment. That he lived even so was thanks only to his being a Knight of stubborn vitality.
“Y-you. You—pull this out at once, and treat me. D-do that, and I will not pursue the crime. I will end it at the level of a fitting punishment. S-so draw this out now. Save me. Save me, I said…”
“Even looking like that, you still want to talk that way? If it were me, I'd beg.”
“Y-you bastard.”
“Ha. I'll give you this much. Even among the vicious ones I've seen, you rank in the top five. Look at you.”
Pride and a noble's self-regard, packed tight—there was no denying it. Well. You would need an ego that strong to carry on like such an idiot. In a sense it was something to admire, and Lee Han even clapped, as if to say it was impressive. …Though of course he was mocking him.
“—!”
The mockery brought Roseth's temper up all over again, but he did not shout. He knew that doing so would only hasten the bleeding and cut short what life he had left. So—
“Save me.”
“That again?”
“No. This is not a threat. It is merely what is obvious. If you kill me, you will only cast the kingdom into greater disorder. You know this, do you not? Should I die, the ones suspected at once will be none other than Galahad, or the royal house of Pendragon. And should that suspicion spread, the spark of civil war will catch in the kingdom. So if you do not wish to see that, save me. I will let this matter pass in quiet.”
Roseth was threatening him. Even reduced to that shape, that condition, his face still showed a firm belief that he would not die—that he knew survival was the only possible outcome.
“…Hoo.”
“Yes. You understand.”
Whether he mistook the sigh for assent, a thin smile touched Roseth, and he was already reaching for the scheme he would spin the moment he was out of this—
“Why is it the repertoire your sort spits out never has a single new thing in it? Every last one of you is obvious. If you're going to threaten a man, at least be creative. Play some different card. You haven't got any of that. ……Isn't that right, you wicked Yin Ghost.”
Ffft.
“That's rather harsh, treating me the same as a man like that. Still, I'd like to think I'm at least a little better than him…”
Since when had she been there?
Together with that seductive voice, come all at once out of empty air, a beautiful woman revealed herself—a woman of sinister allure, red hair streaming as she appeared.
Instinctive unease swept over Roseth, and with it the certainty that her appearance could never bode well for him.
He made to open his mouth again. A beat sooner—
“Yin Ghost. No. Dream Fiend. —Eat.”
Lee Han's curt command fell, and the instant the permission was given—
“As you command.”
—the Dream Fiend, Judia, swallowed Roseth's body like an obedient hound.