A Man's Growth, Remarkable to Behold (5)
It was the first time.
Thud! Not of being beaten one-sidedly, but of actually being able to answer like this.
Whoooom!!
Lee Han dropped his guard, drove strength through his whole body, and threw the fist anyway. His face was left completely open, and the veteran mercenary—not a man to waste an opening—slipped the blow in a blink and answered with a counter.
A speed Lee Han could never have met before.
And yet.
Whoosh…!
"…Hoo."
"Damn."
Lee Han had succeeded in reacting. All he had done was tilt his head and let the punch comb past, but when he thought of how, until now, he had blocked those fists without ever once managing to evade them, it was an enormous step forward.
And then, almost at once—
Whoosh!
Crack!!
Neither could have said who moved first. Lee Han's fist and Caesar's met.
Boom! Boooom!
It was hard to believe the sound was coming from fists at all. If anything, it was the sound of lightning striking the earth. Strange. Neither man was using so much as a technique, let alone Fighting Art, and yet what they were showing would have overwhelmed most high-ranking knights.
At some point their fists grew too fast to follow, and their feet never rested, each step the best move available. Anyone with even a little eye for it would have thought of Go, or of chess. It was not merely fast and violent. The best decision was being made on the instant—a sparring so exacting it was no exaggeration to call it performance art. That it was unfolding on a mountain where no one could see it was the tragedy. For warriors who had struck a wall, a bout like this might have been a heaven-sent chance.
…But neither Lee Han nor Caesar was crashing fists together for an audience.
Only this.
Crrrack!
Whoooosh!
Because they acknowledged each other, they clenched their fists hard, to break the strong man in front of them.
At some point they stopped raising their guards. Defense was a luxury now.
Whaaam! A face was smashed.
Wham! A flank was hammered.
Even so, they were not stupidly trading blows. Slip! Whoosh…! The punches that must not land were dodged again and again by the width of a sheet of paper. What astonished was that all of it happened at point-blank range, and what grew unbearable was that they still insisted on fighting like out-boxers.
Dodge by a hair. Hit when the chance comes. There were plenty of moments when they read each other so cleanly that every strike cut only air, and their fists began to collide more and more often.
KRA-KOOM!
A stubborn, breathless relay of blows, without a single breath between them. They had chosen it because they knew a moment's carelessness meant being broken through; it showed just how fierce their will to win was; and when they had carried it for about a minute, as if testing the limit of their lungs—
Tok—.
"Haah, haaah…."
"……."
Lee Han and Caesar stopped their fists at the same time.
"…Damn it."
More precisely, they stopped a single step before Lee Han's blow would have landed cleanly on Caesar's face for the first time.
…Three minutes. Time.
They had recognized, exactly, that round twenty-six was over, and they had stopped. That, too, was a stubborn sight.
"I wouldn't have minded, you know…."
"I didn't want to get that petty."
"Heh. The world's a hard place for your type."
"…Sad that I can't deny it."
Thud….
With that mutter Lee Han simply folded where he stood and gasped for breath, as if he could not stay on his feet a moment longer.
"…I can't do any more. I give up!"
It was Lee Han's surrender.
Even so.
"Heh. You don't look like a man who lost."
"…Because I got something out of it. And not dying was enough, wasn't it? As long as there's a next time."
"……."
"So live a long time, handsome old man. Next time, we do it with both fists."
"…Is that a blessing or a curse? Honestly. Ha ha ha!!"
Caesar laughed, bright and easy, and rubbed at the tingling in his arm and side. The ache was sharp beyond words. Wondering what would have happened if that last blow had reached his face, he shook his head.
He grows in the space of a blink.
The terror of youth, he thought—and yet, feeling his own heart pound hard, Caesar found himself a little embarrassed.
"Why's my chest this hot at my age…."
Even thinking it unbecoming of him, he let the excuse slip out into a heat that did not feel bad at all.
He had realized it once they were past round five.
This old man is about even with me in strength and speed.
In experience, judgment, and tactics Caesar was overwhelming, but their speed was merely comparable, and in raw strength Lee Han held a narrow edge.
And yet.
…He's strangely faster and stronger than me?
A strange feeling. He could tell the man was stronger, but he could not accept why the gap was this extreme. If strength and speed were similar, the bout ought to have looked at least somewhat like sparring. It had not, not even a little.
Did experience and judgment make a difference like this?
No.
Those were advantages, certainly, but not enough to toy with him. Then what difference let the man play with him?
…I'll just take more hits.
Lee Han decided to keep facing him rather than think it through. Since when had he fought by working his head? As if he had the leisure for speculation.
When round fifteen ended—
Huh….
Only after playing sandbag for a full ten rounds, desperate for an answer, did he catch a hint.
…Is this a reaction speed a human can have?
Yes. What Lee Han learned while being a sandbag was that Caesar's reaction speed was not a level permitted to primates. If he had to put a name to it, those movements skipped the process of thought and came close to pure intuition, and if one compared it to reading in Go, every judgment born of that intuition was a Blue Spot. The old man could not actually be an AI wearing a human shape—so how was such a thing possible?
Before that question—
"So I decided to take more hits. Figured if I kept being a sandbag, an answer might turn up."
"……."
"Up through about round eighteen I tried fighting on intuition the way you do, and got pounded every time. After that, through round twenty, I kept switching methods. Honestly, I was ready to keep at it through fifty."
"…An attempt of breathtaking stupidity."
"If your head's short, you make up for it with your body. That's the rule. But I must've been lucky. Right as we went into round twenty-three—"
Whoosh.
"…I more or less got it."
Tak.
Lee Han answered the fist coming at him and blocked it, as if to prove the block had not been luck.
Drip….
"…Hoo. This is seriously hard, though."
Blood ran from his nose. A nosebleed he could not remember the last time he had suffered. It was not flowing because Caesar had beaten it out of him. It was closer to the aftereffect of using sense. Lee Han wiped the blood away and shook his head, as if an unfamiliar act made his skull throb without pause.
Seeing it, Caesar let out a sound of open admiration, as if marveling at that overwhelming vitality.
"To enter the Domain and have it end in a nosebleed. Ordinarily, fainting wouldn't even be strange."
"Not like I'm short on stamina or grit. …Anyway, this is what you call Domain, I take it?"
All he had done was put his senses into a real-time open state. Did they really call something like that by so grand a name?
"Because it means you've stepped into a realm not permitted to humans."
"That's an exaggeration…."
"Exaggeration? The world you're looking at has changed, hasn't it?"
"……I can't deny it."
It had. After opening his senses, Lee Han was taking in every piece of information flooding in from every direction—the wind moving around them, the chirping of birds, even the smell of soil and grass. Opened senses let him see the world from countless new angles.
And stranger still—
"That the information is being summarized in real time, lifting your judgment and your intuition. Doesn't that send a chill through you?"
"…I told you to quit the mind reading."
Dead on. It felt as if his thoughts had been read. But this was only—
"I'm not reading thoughts. I'm speaking from my own experience."
"……."
"You won't understand why a thing like this is possible, though, will you? You'll be wondering how it can happen when all you did was open your senses."
"…This is driving me crazy."
Yes. Advice only a senior who had already walked that road could give.
"It's possible because you're a warrior who has entered Intent. Intent is the same as the birth of a new sensory organ—no different from an invisible nose and ears appearing on my body. But even if organs like that are newly born, using them is exceedingly difficult, and whether a warrior can control that organ or not opens an enormous gap."
Even after one entered Intent, the work of opening it as sense was extremely arduous. As with a bodily organ that had atrophied, it was not something training and effort alone could put back into use.
"That's why I thought you would never become my equal in this fight, not to the end. And then, as if you'd suddenly thrown a door open, you reached the Domain. It's been a long time since I had an experience this absurd."
"…To that extent?"
"Of course! I'll say it again—what you've grasped isn't something you reach just by wanting to."
What was required was a strong shock, enough to jolt an organ that had atrophied. And a shock like that—
"—is something you can only give by living through the threshold of death and coming back. In that sense, I'll ask. Have you ever died and come back to life?"
"……."
"Looks like something comes to mind."
"…The butler."
"Butler? Hm?! Ho—don't tell me you crossed blades with John Ray Albert?"
"……."
"…Your body's remarkably intact. He's the sort who'd take a leg or an eye. Has the man grown milder with age?"
"……."
Lee Han could not bring himself to tell the graceless story of how he had nearly been torn limb from limb, and only wore a sour look.
Should I be grateful he put me through apparent death, or shouldn't I?
That thanks would not come out toward the man who had planted the trauma was probably only natural.