The Knight Speaks with the Butler (3)
The chains rattled. It was over in an instant—a hard clatter, and not even the space for a reaction. Truly.
"Ghk—?!"
Between one breath and the next, the thing had him by the throat. People said a man could lose his nose with his eyes still open. Albert had gone one better. Eyes open, and—
What in the hell is drawing and quartering supposed to mean?!
He was a single step from execution.
The links ground and strained. I—I have to get free…?! By the grace of the Intent behind his Diamond Indestructible Body, he was still, mercifully, whole, even under a drawing and quartering that ignored the laws of physics. He could not hold forever. At best his Intent would endure five minutes. Past that, his body would simply be divided into five, and Lee Han meant to force his way out by raw strength if he had to.
CRACK.
"!!"
As if the chains had read that pathetic thought, agony erupted from the places they bound him—a vast flush of heat, surging up all at once.
"!!!!"
There was no wound. No poison had entered him either. So long as he maintained Unbreakable, his body was clearly in no danger of breaking. And yet—
"Nnnngh—!!"
He had to scream. It was no act. The pain was sincere enough to drive him mad. What was he even supposed to call it? The feeling of a knife twisting in the flesh, or of being seared over a fire? Whatever name it wore, it was suffering past all description, dizzying enough to steal the mind of even Lee Han, who prided himself on a fair tolerance for pain.
And then Albert's soft voice brushed his ear.
"A personal thought, if you'll indulge me. I tend to regard pain as the most meaningful blessing the Light has ever bestowed upon humankind. Is it not thanks to pain that a human feels he is alive? Because pain exists, we treat a wound before it deepens and strive to cure disease. Had humanity possessed no sense of pain, humanity as it stands would not exist. Extinction would have been extinction, and that would have been the end of it. So I am convinced that pain is a blessing—an essential thing, one that reminds us how precious life is."
"And yet… now and then there appear sinners who would use that blessing to satisfy their own desire. They force pain upon others and take a profit from it. …Foolishly."
The chains cinched tighter with a grind, and this time a cold like freezing closed over him.
"In my younger days I chastised sinners of that sort—the ones who beamed and cackled at the sight of another's pain. I was full of hot blood then, so I chastised them rather excessively. And what do you suppose? Those same sinners, who had felt such rapture before someone else's suffering, the moment pain fell upon themselves, began crying out to be spared. How could anyone be so foolish…? But another thought followed at once. Ah. Perhaps they were not foolish. Perhaps they were only ignorant."
A lurch. This time his breath stopped. If it had only been the choking he might have endured it, but his body grew heavy as if he had been dropped into water, and water seemed to pour into his lungs. Mouth, nose, ears—every opening was filling. Water torture. A classical method, and a cruel one, certain enough to survive all the way into the modern age and drive a human being to the limit.
"Ignorance is not a sin. Refusing to learn, however, may become one. And so I decided to educate those ignorant sinners. What pain is. To let them know pain, so a sinner might awaken to his own sin."
A low thrum. Rising chill, pain, the inability to breathe, searing heat, and on top of it all the helpless lethargy of a fevered cold—the whole of it rushed in like complications piled upon a sickness. Before that wave, Lee Han could not even hold his mind together. Little by little, his consciousness began to go.
"Pain. That is my Intent. A very intuitive Intent. Precisely because it is so intuitive, the conditions of its use are somewhat exacting. The experience of the one who wields it matters, you see. …Put simply, I can pass on to another as much pain as I myself have suffered. Well? Nothing remarkable at all, is it."
He was not asking in hope of an answer. He was reciting. And in the moment that empty, gentle laugh left him—
A sickening crunch.
The sound was unbearable, the noise of something being crushed to pulp, enough to turn a listener's knees weak with sympathetic pain. It seemed as though something, unable to bear the pressure of the chains, had shattered to pieces. It was no different from the sound of a whole body being smashed. And yet—
"Heh heh."
Even at a rupture like that, Albert only smiled, perfectly pleased. He still looked as if he were enjoying himself. For a moment it seemed like mockery aimed at an opponent he had already destroyed.
"Pwah—!"
The opponent had not been destroyed. Quite the opposite.
"Hah! Hahh… hah! I—I died and came back……!!"
If anything, he was as fresh as a fish just pulled from the water. Lee Han collapsed clear of the chains, having escaped them by a hair. He dragged in lungful after lungful of clean air, like a man learning for the first time that oxygen could taste so sweet, and upon the man who had been taught the preciousness of life in five minutes the butler bestowed a satisfied word of praise.
"Splendid."
…He was not grateful in the slightest.
"…You mean you're disappointed I didn't die."
"Not at all. I am sincerely impressed. I never imagined you would slip those chains."
It simply failed to show on his face. Albert was genuinely astonished. He prided himself on having lived a good long while, and across those years the endings of men caught in his art of execution had been mostly the same. They died in a breath beneath the execution and went comfortably. Or they were destroyed inside Pain. Or they fell into beasts, or into idiots, forgetting they had ever been human. A few powers who stood outside common sense had escaped the fates listed above, but they were a truly tiny minority. By the present day it was no exaggeration to say that no one could slip his execution. And yet this opponent had slipped it. And by a trick like that.
"To contract and compress the muscles of your whole body, the bones, and the flow of your blood, and slip free that way—a remarkable talent, Sir Lee Han."
Albert clapped as if he had just watched a circus, or a magic show. The man receiving the praise could not shake a reasonable suspicion.
"…No matter how I look at it, you're just needling me."
He had died and lived. That was no metaphor. It was the fact, stated as it was.
His joints cracked. In that impossibly desperate moment he had produced a rather fine idea, working bone and muscle and the flow of his blood in the instant before consciousness went out, and so slipping the chains. Put simply, he had shrunk his body and popped through a narrow passage. A hasty manipulation of that kind was the sort of thing that ruined a body, but he had to live first, hadn't he?
I did consider Repulsion Qigong. I don't think it would have taken. Not on that.
The chains were made of Aura. Durability was one matter; more than that, they were a substance he could not swear Repulsion Qigong would break. And Repulsion Qigong was not the only problem. Sword Ki, Sword Resonance, Sword Star—arts of that order all demanded a high degree of focus. Merely keeping Unbreakable through a crisis like that had already been luck enough. There had been no room to use anything else. Which was why he found himself endlessly admirable for thinking, in the moment his mind was fading, to apply the Bone-Compression Art.
If he had not remembered—
…I'd be dead.
Lee Han looked at the chains with a sickened stare. Past sickened. They were horrifying. What kind of thing was that even supposed to be?
"…That wasn't made for education. That's an Intent somebody brooded into existence by asking how to kill a man in the most painful way possible, and how to torture him in the most painful way possible. Isn't it?"
A reasonable suspicion. The former heresy inquisitor denied it.
"A misunderstanding. It was made, from beginning to end, for education."
"……No matter how I look at it, it isn't."
What kind of Intent was that? There was no instrument of torture in the man's hands. And even so, Albert could torture. He could perform a water torture where there was no water. He could inflict a searing burn where there was no flame. He could give a man frostbite when it was not winter. He could go further still and reproduce the lethargy and the pain of falling ill—a fevered cold, a bout of food poisoning. And the more horrific point, did Lee Han even need to ask?
No matter how I look at it, that isn't the end of it.
Sure enough.
"Mm. Precisely so. You have a keen eye. The pains I can reproduce with my Intent come to about 6,620 in all. There are surely pains I fail to remember, but the kinds I can reproduce with certainty amount to roughly that. Heh heh."
"……"
A cruel butler, turning suspicion into certainty as if he were delivering the confirming blow.
"Of course, the pains you suffered, Sir Lee Han, were prepared only from the higher grades among those six thousand and more. Anything less, I thought, would not be enough to drive you."
"…This is genuinely horrific."
It seemed he had been granted that horrific pain because he was acknowledged, and this once he was not grateful in the least. It was nothing but awful, and the corner of his eye would not stop twitching. And here was the fact that raised the hair on his neck.
So that man deliberately went through more than six thousand tortures and pains?
Albert had stated flatly that he could not reproduce what he himself had not suffered. He had no reason to lie to Lee Han, which meant he had spoken only fact, and the truth of it sent a chill straight through him.
Now I understand why every human in the South is afraid of that man.
Carrying out a drawing and quartering alone was bad enough, but that was only a minor element. If he set his mind to it, he could deliver pain to any target whatsoever, without exception—just as Lee Han had felt pain no matter how hard his body, no matter that it would not break. An executioner who bestowed suffering with perfect fairness, whether the one before him was a demon or a Demon King.
There was no one to whom the office of heresy inquisitor suited so perfectly. Before him, there would be no existence that could escape interrogation…
……Screw the conversation. I couldn't just surrender even now, could I?
For the first time in a long while, the knight regretted his choice.