A Knight's Return to the Farm Is Wise (2)
The venison stew was, unexpectedly, quite good.
Perhaps the crops they had raised with their own hands had something to do with it. Perhaps the maid was simply that skilled. Or perhaps it was neither.
"I found wild grapes today. I tried them, and they were fairly sweet. I was thinking I might try my hand at wine."
"Lucky for us. We were just running out of cooking wine."
"I found rock salt, too. Enough, I'd say, for the two of us to eat for a thousand years."
"Then we'll have to live a long time."
"...That's a novel opinion."
For all he knew, the talk itself was the seasoning, waking the appetite.
"Hehe."
"That wasn't praise— no. It was praise."
"Ahem."
Beginning with the wild grapes, every small story came tumbling out: fiber crops that could be woven into cloth, the clothes she was making from the hides of the wild animals he brought home, the ordinary talk of people living a life, and even a promise that tomorrow they would picnic together somewhere safe. The conversation wandered wherever their thoughts drifted, and still, even talk like that was nothing if not pleasant.
"Is your training going well?"
"Nothing so grand as training. Closer to polishing what I've learned so far. And if you're asking whether it's going well, then probably..."
By way of an answer, and not a little like a boast, Lee Han gave the knife a light swing.
The next instant the air flared, and something scattered with a soft rustle.
"Wow!"
"Fortunately, the results have kept up with the effort."
Lee Han had succeeded in blooming two kinds of flowers. Plum blossoms and lotuses. The two mingled as they drifted, and in a moment the scattering petals filled the narrow house, lending the place an abundance beyond words—a sight both fiercely beautiful and strangely wondrous.
"...They're pretty."
"......"
Somehow his eyes kept leaving the flowers for that clear, bright smile. And he couldn't help the thought.
Good thing I put the work in.
Because of it, he could make her smile. Before a smile that felt like repayment for all those days of effort, he was simply, quietly pleased.
It went back to that day—the battle against the Brass Knight Order—when Lee Han had failed to control his technique. More precisely, techniques he had never intended had gone off on their own. He had meant to loose an ordinary wide-area strike. What came out was a suddenly colossal one.
Even so, he had no time to look into what had happened to his body. Barely finished with the fight, he was summoned here and there, and in the end he even thrashed the king and landed in a cell. Where, in all of that, was the time for training worthy of the name?
In that sense, being unemployed was a fine thing. He had time now. Only last year, whenever he set himself to train in earnest some nuisance would turn up and he had to quit the weights or the blade. Now there were no nuisances.
And so, three months.
Lee Han bent every effort toward finding what was wrong with him, the lotus from that battle chief among the questions. And then—
Huh. When did this grow so much?
He came to realize that a forgotten resident had been raising its strength all on its own.
The Dire Wolf's fighting art. The art carved into his body last autumn, and the culprit that had sent his power rampaging of its own accord.
In the past, Lee Han had received the fighting art from Rak de Duron, Galahad's champion, the knight they called a genius. He had needed strength to defeat the Tower Lord, and the two of them had learned from each other while both shouted give-and-take. Unlike then, however, Lee Han's fighting art still sat at a beginner's level. At the time he had shown astonishing ability, having received it as though by Transmission of Power Across Bodies, but once the battle ended the art's realm drained away at a stroke, like a balloon that swells hard and then shrivels.
Natural enough, if one thought about it. Power gained by a shortcut, in the end. What comes easily goes easily. That was only the way of things.
Even so, the sense of that battle, and Rak de Duron's realization, still remained in his body. Depending on the effort, displaying the majesty of that day was not wholly impossible. Lee Han knew it, and so he had no mind to train the fighting art in a rush. He meant to take his time and work it in gradually, until it fit him.
And yet.
"—During the battle in Wales, when I used the Sacred Relic I received from the venerable Great Saintess, something strange happened in my body."
"What kind of thing?"
"The vessel of the fighting art. The Sacred Relic's holy power, my life force, and the rest tangled together, and a peculiar core formed."
"A core?"
"In an ordinary fighting art, whatever serves as the core is usually something like a monster's monster core. What I mean is that some thoroughly bizarre substitute for that settled itself squarely in my heart."
He had realized it roughly two days ago. Three months of pondering and poking about, and only then was he certain what it was.
"I can understand how it happened, too. The spearman who passed the fighting art to me is probably using an inborn killing intent in place of a monster core, and I suspect that's why. A fighting art that takes after him went hunting through my body for something to stand in for killing intent, then greedily seized my life force and holy power and spent them however it liked. Anyway, the bastard who taught it has a personality twisted in knots, so of course this sort of thing happens."
If the man who had taught him, Rak de Duron, had heard that, he would have made himself sick with rage and clutched the back of his neck. He had handed over a supreme fighting art, one that held the higher secret teachings passed down only in Galahad and his own independent realization, and here was no gratitude at all. It would have been infuriating. Then again, Rak de Duron had swallowed most of Lee Han's own realizations, no less thoroughly than the fighting art itself, so they were square.
In any case.
"I don't know if it's because of this energy, but my control over my strength went strange."
"I see. Then are you a holy knight now?"
"What?"
"You said you gained holy power. Doesn't that make you a holy knight?"
"Uh... well. It's a little different."
"Nnh?"
A holy knight was someone who used holy law as well as the fighting art—what people called a magic swordsman. Lee Han's energy could do no such thing. And for good reason.
"My life force ate the holy power."
"?"
To say it again, Lee Han's life force was formidable. Strong enough to stagger even countless powers on the level of great-house heads, it was at least ten times that of a knight who bore a monster core. That was the minimum. At its greatest, even he found it hard to guess. So it was only natural that the Sacred Relic's frail holy power should be toyed with by his life force.
And so—
"In the end, my holy power has been completely digested inside me. Only, somewhere in the digesting, this... seems to have become a mutation."
"A mutation?"
"Mm. Let me show you again."
With a bright flare, Lee Han raised the knife and bloomed the flowers once more. Plum blossoms and lotuses.
"Can you tell the difference between the two?"
"Mmm... huh?"
She twitched her nose like a puppy and sniffed, then blinked.
"...Sir Knight, does this lotus have a scent? A real flower's scent."
A faint fragrance drifted from it. Truly, it was giving off a scent such as a flower might.
"Keen as ever. Excellent."
"Hehe."
"Well, as you've noticed, the two flowers were bloomed in different ways. One through sword resonance, and the other sword resonance with that mutant mixed in."
"Hoh. So that's possible."
"Strange, isn't it?"
Lee Han had learned it himself, through no small amount of watching and testing.
"It isn't on the level of holy power, but the energy itself holds a vitality that doesn't fall short of it, and it's fairly good at putting monsters down. I happened to learn as much today, while I was experimenting on some ogres I ran into... no. While I was suppressing them. Still, I don't think it can be used the way holy law is. In the end it's only a mismatched mutation, with my life force stirred through it."
"Amazing."
Her eyes shone, her face the face of someone who badly wanted to poke the lotus bud. Even so, she seemed to know that touching it rashly might be dangerous, and a look of regret showed. At that look—
"You may touch it."
"Really?"
"Yes, it's fine. I told you. A peculiar mutation."
The bud opened wide and settled neatly into her hand, and the lotus did not threaten her in the least. Rather the opposite.
"It's warm... and it feels nice!"
"That's how it is."
So long as he held no malice and no will to kill, this energy would not harm a life on a whim. It seemed to carry a certain mercy toward living things, an energy full of abundant power, like the light of the sun. Calling it dharma power wouldn't have been bad, but that felt too carelessly named. Innate true qi was no better. Didn't it give off the image of life force streaming away? So, having thought it over, Lee Han decided it would not be bad to take the name from the verse he had chanted when he used the Sacred Relic.
None other than this.
The name he set upon the mutant fighting art that was his.
And the maid who heard it—
"If it pleases you, Sir Knight, then it pleases me too!"
She only clapped her hands and rejoiced. At Layla's praise, Lee Han could do nothing but scratch his cheek, hopelessly shy. Having someone who praised him no matter what he did was awkward, and deeply satisfying.
Crunch. Crunch.
"...Woof."
"Bark."
"Hissss."
Orthrus cracked its eyes half-open, chewing an ogre rib the not-quite-human human had picked up along the road and tossed its way. Both heads and the snake tail turned their gazes aside and resolved to devote themselves to the bone.
...Because the sight stung. Honestly.
"Awoo..."
Three months of watching those two rub salt in the wound, and Orthrus felt ready to fall ill from sheer vexation. Born to the fate of a hermaphrodite, for whom romance and reproduction were impossible, its side ached without end.