Episode 80: The Knight Sets Out Once More (1)
Fat drops struck the ground. Tok. Tok.
Then they came harder, a rattling downpour, and one look at the bulk and the drift of the storm clouds said this was no shower that would spit for a moment and pass. In a sense, the rain had no business being there at all. Not thirty minutes earlier the sky had been a clear, bright blue; now it was stained dark, as if that blue had been a lie.
Which most likely meant—
"Just as you'd expect of a sacred mountain. We haven't even started the climb, and already it's turning us away."
"One careless step and we're dead."
…proof the mountain was angry.
"Then shall we turn back?"
"No. That won't do."
"Aigoo…"
They kept up the playful exchange even in the face of the mountain's wrath — until, a moment later, they had no choice but to harden their faces.
KRA-KOOM!
Lightning began to tear through the storm clouds, poised to fall at any instant, as if the mountain were demanding they steel themselves properly before they dared set foot upon it.
"This won't be easy…"
"Even so, we still have to go up, don't we?"
"That we do."
Playful they might have been, but their confidence knew no bounds, and in the end they climbed anyway.
Arrogantly.
A low rumble rolled through the stone.
Mount Bulkan answered those arrogant, insolent primates with nothing but fury.
Rattle-rattle-rattle!
A rain of gravel poured down over his head.
Thud!
Stones great and small hammered his back and skull without mercy. On an ordinary man it would have meant serious injury, but fortunately gravel could not leave so much as a scratch on him. A sturdy carcass, if nothing else.
"Who told you to show off how tough that body is? I told you to dodge."
"……."
"Ah. Right. He can't hear me."
Caesar could say whatever he pleased; the other man was not going to hear it. And no wonder.
"I was the one who told him to do it, but I never thought he'd actually commit to training this extreme."
His opponent had sealed away more than eight-tenths of his senses — thoroughly enough to wring admiration even from Caesar.
"Nnngh…!"
He swayed.
To call Lee Han's appearance a spectacle would have been putting it kindly. A blindfold bound his eyes so tightly that not a thread of light could enter. His ears were stopped with magically treated plugs — heaven only knew where he had found them — so that sound was cut off completely, and his nose had been sealed shut with wax. He could still breathe through his mouth, but only past a mask soaked in water. It was no exaggeration to say that every sense but touch had been locked away.
And the crueler part—
"He's already been at it for nine hours."
—was that nine hours had passed, and still he had not rested for a single moment.
Relentless. Caesar knew, because he had attempted something like it himself. A state like that delivered tremendous physical and mental strain, an unpleasantness without end. Even the sense of time disappeared, and nothing remained but dark thoughts, breeding endlessly. So he admired the man even though there was still no result to show for it.
It isn't only the body that's hard. The mind itself is iron.
How many fools were there whose bodies were strong and whose spirits were weak? Fools who called themselves warriors anyway, the sort that used to send fire boiling up from Caesar's gut. Now all that came out of him was admiration. He had trained with passion enough in his own youth, but this was a different intensity altogether.
Young people these days are terrifying. Terrifying! Heh!
Even so…
WHACK!!
"Still a long way to go, though."
Struck once more by the gravel Caesar had thrown, Lee Han scratched at his head as if baffled — and Caesar found himself wondering why the man, knowing it was coming, still could not dodge.
What Lee Han was doing, of course, was not circus practice. It was the work of attuning his Domain.
As Caesar had put it:
"I'll say it again. A Domain is no different from a new organ of sense and a new organ of the body having sprouted. So the idea of mastering it overnight is nonsense. There are those whose skill actually deteriorates once they step into a Domain, and the reason is none other than this — they were swallowed by it. But if you attune the Domain, if you can wield it as you would your own hands and feet, then your skill will take a true step forward. …A step forward enough to answer the movements of a Superhuman."
A Domain was not simply the notion of the senses growing keener. It was closer to a supercomputer that took in every scrap of information from one's surroundings in real time and rendered it as usable knowledge. Wield it with true skill, and one could answer even a mystery that governed space and time.
That had been Caesar's answer.
A mystery of space and time — what even is that? Does somebody stop time?
The idle thought flickered through Lee Han and was gone. What mattered now was—
Thud!
Ah. Hit again.
—getting struck by even one less stone.
Today alone he had taken hundreds of them. They didn't hurt, but being pelted with gravel soured the mood all the same, and his brow drew tight of its own accord. And yet, however hard he focused, however hard he tried—
I genuinely cannot feel it.
—the Domain was still a complete mess.
How was he even supposed to describe the sensation?
…Like I've turned into an octopus?
He knew how absurd it sounded even as he thought it, and yet it truly was a sense past any proper description. With no better way to put the grotesque feeling into words, the frustration of it was enough to choke him.
"Hoo…"
"Calling it here for today?"
"It only feels like I'm tormenting my body."
Lee Han unwound everything bound tight around him and drew a lungful of clean air. After a full nine hours, the freshness of it was startling.
"If the body is suffering, then you're doing it properly. Torment it, and torment it again. About the time you grow used to that suffering, the day will come when you grow used to the Domain as well."
"…Does it take long?"
"Took me about two years, I'd say."
"……."
"Heh. I had no one to help me, so of course it dragged on. You've got an adviser, haven't you? Me. It'll be over far sooner, so don't worry."
True to his word, whenever Lee Han asked for counsel, Caesar taught without stinting. As befitted a man who had come out of the Monks, he was not miserly with instruction, and he spared neither advice nor warning on the handling of a Domain. Thanks to that, though it had only been two days, Lee Han had the fundamentals carved firmly into his head. With his training helped along like this, he felt himself advancing even if only by half a step at a time, and he counted it luck.
"Shame that reliable adviser of mine leaves tomorrow."
A shame, yes — this particular luck would not last much longer.
Caesar shrugged. He regretted it himself, but…
"Nothing to be done, is there?"
Rumble!
"The mountain is refusing me."
The weather on Vulcan was anything but ordinary. A bolt from a clear sky, one might have called it. The day was plainly fair, and yet thunder kept rolling without pause, as if in anger.
…Proof that the mountain was rejecting Caesar.
"My kids stayed nearly a month and it was fine. Why is it only like this with you…?"
"Who can say what standard a sacred mountain uses? Well. If I had one guess, I've fought a great many wandering mysteries in my time. It may dislike me for that."
"Wandering mysteries?"
"Labyrinths and fogs made of mystery, or animals and plants, or people — different from monsters, and in a sense far more vicious than monsters. Wander the continent long enough, get tangled in enough incidents, and you meet them now and then."
"……Ah. I have a rough idea what you mean. I ran into a few myself, back in the day."
Something came to mind. Among the great slaving companies Lee Han had once brought down, there had been bastards who sold exactly that sort of thing — flowers and trees in human shape, or turtles and butterflies as clever as people.
"Mystery hunters wearing the mask of a slave caravan."
"They're gone from the world now, so they're nothing worth caring about. I let the wandering ones go free, too. Whatever they were."
"……."
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Somehow I feel I'm seeing yet another reason the sacred mountain is fond of you."
"?"
"Hm. Now and then I wonder if I ought to have settled things with words instead of a blade."
A murmur touched with a little regret — though as far as Lee Han could see, the old man would have done exactly the same even if he went back to the past. More than that, it was obvious he regretted the choice only in the saying of it. Not a speck of regret showed in the choice itself.
Well. A man they call the Mercenary King isn't soft enough to waste regret on the past.
He had known him barely three days, but the Caesar Lee Han had seen was that sort of man. Once he set his mind on a thing, he saw it through. There was a backbone in him that would smash even regret to pieces. A formidable character.
Someone might well ask how he could rate the man so highly after so short an acquaintance. At least in Lee Han's eyes, formidable was the right word.
"Hm. A word of advice — you'd do well to be careful. Helping a mystery is a good deed. But there's no telling how that deed comes back around, and the way a mystery shows its gratitude is, more often than not, a misfortune visited on a frail human. For instance, as a token of thanks, it might suddenly turn you into a woman."
"…How is that a token of thanks?"
"Didn't I say? They show gratitude in their own way."
"That's just being a nuisance."
"A nuisance, yes. …Still, well."
Fwoosh!
"—less revolting than human malice, at any rate."
In that instant Caesar lightly tossed one of the stones in his hand. The result of that casual throw, however—
BOOOOM!!
—was savage, and destructive. Destructive enough to ruin a stretch of dense forest.
"Damage nature like that and Vulcan will hate you even more."
"Then let it hate me. Tomorrow's me can deal with tomorrow's problems. Ahahaha!"
"…A real piece of work."
Shameless past the point of shamelessness, and proud of it besides. Impressive, in more ways than one.
Lee Han shook his head and turned his gaze toward where the gravel had flown.
—Toward the vermin giving off a foul stench.
"Y-you're going too far. W-we can t-talk, c-can't we…?"
"……."
"Haha… th-that stare is… really scary…"
Crunch. Crack.
Bodies reduced to wrung-out rags, and still regenerating — the vermin. Lee Han was sick to death of the sight.
"Honestly. This is exactly why retiring to farm the countryside wears a man out."
Weren't there entirely too many mosquitoes showing up for a drink of his blood?