Episode 72: The Knight Wore a Suit (4)
The people were anxious. Natural enough, if one stopped to think. A world that had been peaceful beyond all measure only ten minutes before had come crashing down.
Strictly speaking, it was only the streets that had fallen. But for those who had lived their whole lives here, their home had been smashed apart in an instant, and that was no different from the world itself collapsing. They had seen, too, that the stewards they trusted had in fact been switched out, and so the despair bearing down on them only grew thicker.
And yet, in the midst of that despair, the knights and soldiers who were supposed to protect them—the ones guarding the central district—
"Break through! Break through!"
"There's more! There's another monster...!"
"Aaaaah!"
They were barely holding, with no room left to look after anyone else. In ordinary times they had seemed utterly dependable. Now they looked like nothing but hopeless incompetents, and the very fact of having lived in trust of trash like that came over the people as a humiliation.
They wished some other knight order would come, and quickly, but there was no knowing when that might be, nor any way to guess whether they would still be alive when it did.
And in the midst of it—
Slash. Thud.
Why is that girl so daring? So brave?
Ridiculous as it was, the one protecting them was Tristan's adopted daughter—the very girl they had so thoroughly scorned in their hearts.
Whoosh!
...Not only brave. Strong, as well.
Each time the girl's blade moved, monsters died.
One strike, one kill.
She never needed a second blow, carving a monster apart in a single cut, and she was extraordinary. Nor did she fight with the rapier alone. She swung the scabbard to crack the jaw of a goblin creeping in from her blind spot, or struck a vital point to make an opening, and she used every advantage of that small body—slipping, just barely, into a monster's embrace, stabbing, and pulling free.
Move like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The words came to mind of their own accord at the sight of her sword, and the people pressed flat to the ground found their eyes going soft and hazy, as if bewitched by the blade. The swordsmanship was tremendous, but it was the brave spirit rising from that small body that lifted the heart all on its own.
Then—
Crunch!
"I'll help!"
"Thank you. Your name, if I may..."
"Call me Dolchen. Retired, and an old man, but I should be of some help."
"It feels as though a thousand men and ten thousand horses have arrived."
"Ho ho! And such pretty words, too."
He called himself retired, but he was a knight who had once been hailed as the Champion of his domain, and several others began to gather at the girl's side with swords in hand. No one had ordered them to.
"If I may ask—are there no further reinforcements?"
"I wanted to call for them, but the central streets are so closed off that even summoning people was difficult. I myself only barely got in under Tristan's name..."
The girl, Levi, said it with a subtle look. The words beneath the words were plain enough: whatever she tried, the nobles blocked her, citing the law.
"......"
Neither the knight nor the girl was arrogant, and yet this was the moment the reason came clear—why they had neither kept reinforcements waiting nor called for any. The face of the retired knight who had asked flushed a furious red.
"......My blood is up. I'll be taking this matter up, and I won't be gentle about it."
"Please endure it for now. You can only take it up once this is settled."
"Ahem."
"And Master came to settle this. And my Master, as far as I know..."
"...is more reliable than any knight in the kingdom."
...I told him to teach her well, but this is a different person entirely.
Lee Han knew that over the winter break Levi had followed Geomdung on escort duty and received a new sword art. He had heard it from the girl herself.
"Th-this is awkward to say, but it feels like a sword art made just for me. I think I've been shown a great kindness by Young Master Roen."
She had been sorry to learn from someone other than him, and yet so taken with the sword art she hardly knew what to do with herself.
There was a reason for that.
Bear-Girl's skill, confirmed in a sidelong glance, was more than enough to draw a breath of admiration. It was a sword art made for the girl alone, created without a speck of waste—her build, her strength, her inborn senses, even her intelligence, all of it combined. Give a thing like that to someone who already overflowed with potential, and, well...
It's like putting wings on a bear.
Some would call that an exaggeration. But finding a swordsman the exact art that suited them was, in baseball terms, like a pitcher coming into the breaking ball that wins the Cy Young—or, for a swimmer, like growing gills.
"You've grown well."
His nose stung. A sniffle threatened. A disciple's growth—today he learned that it was the sort of thing to move a man's heart, even at an age still thick with feeling. If he'd had his way, it would have been a day to drink to her. But—
"Rather arrogant, aren't you? Not even a follow-up strike, with us standing right in front of you... Well, with skill like yours, I suppose you can afford to ignore us. But carelessness like that will end badly."
"......"
Of all times, these bastards were in front of him, so he couldn't even drink that toast in peace. Lee Han made no effort to hide his displeasure. A stone lay nearby, one of the many strewn across the ground.
"Real funny."
He kicked it. Thud.
BOOOOM! A fierce pillar of fire shot up with the blast—hot enough to turn a man to charcoal.
"You think I'm stupid? Like I'd walk into a minefield on purpose."
"Mmm... So you caught that?"
The man, playful air plain on his face, scratched his cheek in awkward embarrassment. Wherever his serious expression had gone, he narrowed his eyes into that thin, characteristic squint and smiled an unpleasant smile.
"You're the fifth to see through this trap. Impressive."
"Five already seems like quite a lot."
"Haha. If you knew the number of people this method has killed runs past five digits, you wouldn't say that."
"......"
"More than that, what a peculiar method. To think you'd strike at this entire group at once... As expected of the one who eliminated the Ghost King and Inanna."
"......"
Whoosh!
"...I was complimenting you?"
Lee Han made no effort to hide his irritation and closed on the man at once. He charged for a spot with no "smell" of a trap, and drew his sword for the first time in a long while, meaning to take that unpleasant mouth off in a single stroke.
Clang—!
"......"
The man's sword flowed the strike aside.
Look at this bastard.
He stamped the ground hard enough to leave a footprint, and in the same instant his sword traced six paths and more—a flurry like shafts of light, aimed at both flanks, the head, the chest, and both legs. Had any swordsman known that this was nothing but the basic forms taught to everyone who learns the sword, not one of them could have hidden their shock.
And yet the man flowed that shocking flurry aside as well. Blood sprayed.
"...Well. Since I completed my training, I thought I wouldn't fall behind anyone with a sword. The world is wide, after all."
He had answered even this absurd strike. He had flowed it aside, yes, but he had not fully dispersed the impact. Blood vessels burst in his arm, and the bitter smile that came to his mouth was only natural.
"It seems it isn't only the vessels. The tendons are severed, too. Astonishing streng—"
"—Changing Sword and Flowing Sword? You've honed those to the limit."
"...?"
"It's been a long time since I faced an orthodox swordsman."
He didn't know the school. But the art was nothing ordinary, and a man who could unfold swordsmanship of that caliber to perfection was already no one to take lightly. At the least—Iliad's level. That writer fellow. Which was to say, the level of a Sword Saint.
A talent of that order was not about to be an ordinary man. And what that meant—
"...Finally found a big one."
Something in him flared. Before the prize his long labor had at last turned up, Lee Han smiled, and he meant it.
Where did a powerhouse like this come from?
A chill, as if a prickling current were washing over him. Farhan, finest swordsman of the Brass Knight Order and its vice-captain, was genuinely astonished. The spirit alone seemed fit to crumple an iron shield. But the strength—the strength truly passed imagination.
In place of the arm whose tendons and vessels had burst, he flowed the sword aside with only his other arm and the strength of his lower body. Even so, these were not blows one could knock away merely by wishing to. The sword screamed, unable to bear the opponent's power.
Considering that the art Farhan had mastered was counted among the three great sword arts of the East, a form of the very highest order, it was nothing short of staggering. He was the man who had completed a sword art no one else had mastered—one said to let its wielder make sport of any powerhouse in the world, if only they saw it through to the end. And that art was losing to a basic form everyone knew.
Dozens of techniques, turning useless before a simplicity that was nothing but cutting and swinging. For the one facing it, the sensation was thoroughly unpleasant. Revolting. It was by no means a good sign.
And Farhan—
"...Now."
His low mutter became the signal, and the knight order moved.
Each of them an accomplished swordsman, and each bearing the body of a Half-Fiend. Their skill would stand with a high-ranking knight, and the elites among them overwhelmed the knights of the great noble houses. At Farhan's call, nineteen of those elites sealed every direction around their enemy and swung their blades with savage abandon, as if to hack him to pieces.
It could only have been a noose of despair, one there was no slipping—
A shriek of vibration.
Flesh crunching apart.
Blood, pattering down.
"......"
2.5 seconds.
That was how long it took nineteen elite knights to become a handful of blood.
"You startled me, calling in reinforcements out of nowhere."
"...That was—"
"This? It's nothing. Repulsion Qigong. A technique I don't really use on people."
"Then what about now?"
"What do you think. I told you."
"What? Something else you want to know?"
The words were flat to the point of cold. Farhan shook his head.
"...You are a frightening man. Truly."
He lifted a hand, disbelief across his face. He had understood that common sense did not apply to this opponent, and so—
"Don't curse it as cowardice. It only means you are that dangerous."
Chk! He ordered the thousands of knights to spare neither means nor method.
"...No. Isn't thousands of men crushing one person already cowardly enough?"
"......"
"I'm right, aren't I?"
"......"
"Funny bastard."
"......"
Chk.
Farhan silently leveled his sword.