The Knight Sets Out Once More (4)
Over the knight exiled from Pendragon, Torn Wing had drawn up a plan to recruit him or remove him, and the man handed the task was none other than Amos.
Amos, the great shaman who could make sport even of the law of cause and effect. If anyone could wring a result out of it, they had been certain it was him.
There was, however, one man in Torn Wing who alone had tried to stop them. The Prophet — Torn Wing's sage, its strategist, and the bearer of any number of other names besides.
He had said as much. A warning that if they reached for the knight, they themselves might be the ones put in danger.
But Amos, at the time—
He had bristled at the Prophet for treating him like a child set down at the water's edge, brushing the warning aside as needless worry. Whatever else he was, he was not so feeble a man as to need looking after.
...It had been a delusion.
A hiss of scorching flesh. Lightning struck him, and something like the smell of burning rose off his body, yet the core of Amos's sorcery held firm — too solid to be shaken by a bolt of lightning. His body alone was unharmed. His mind had been driven as far into a corner as a mind could go.
Drunk on power, I did something stupid. Stupid enough to underestimate him, and to overestimate myself. What a magnificent piece of idiocy. Foolish. What good were eighty years of living? What good was being called a great shaman? And all I did was pick the stupid choices.
He should never have climbed Vulcan in the first place. He should never have fought on ground that favored them so little, and if he had spoken with courtesy instead of provoking the man, he would not have been driven this far.
"Amos, are you all right?"
"...I am not."
"I thought as much. ...So. What will you do?"
Crack. Creak. Kudan's body began to warp into something malformed. The eggs lodged inside him were hatching, making of him a thing that had left humanity behind.
"Shall I kill him?"
"......"
"You need only give the order, Amos. Vulcan's interference is an annoyance, but a man like you has any number of ways to endure it, does he not?"
A long, thin hiss.
A wicked force, of the sort a hell-beast of the Underworld might pour forth, erupted from Kudan's body.
Vulcan's lightning howled as if it meant to kill a thing like him at any moment, but Kudan paid it no mind. His faith was absolute: Amos would hold back the mountain's wrath.
"......"
In his heart, Amos's dilemma only deepened. Yes. If he committed himself — if he steeled himself to accept a comrade's sacrifice — then breaking through Vulcan's anger to fight that knight was possible.
Only—
"Stop. That knight alone is dangerous enough. We do not have the strength to take on the Mercenary King as well."
"That is also true. Keh-heh-heh."
"...Restore your form. That is an order."
"Keh-heh-heh!"
Amos could tell from the sight of that grotesque laugh alone. Hell demonic qi had swallowed Kudan's mind. He was already no longer himself.
The sacred energy. The dense, holy power breathed out by the spirit mountain must have brushed against the hell demonic qi. Amos moved to settle him—
CRACK.
"Who the hell said you could stink the place up like that, you spell-slinging bastard!"
Crunch.
"Ghhhk..."
"......"
Before Amos could even hold him back, the knight had already moved and brought his foot down on the crown of Kudan's head. What shocked Amos was not that his comrade had been struck and was now tumbling, ugly, across the ground.
I... missed the movement?
The new shock was this: that he, of all people, had failed to read it.
He was certainly not at this level.
The knight had left Pendragon three months ago. Three months ago he had clashed with the Brass Knight Order, and from that clash they had taken a rough measure of his strength. That was why Amos had judged that putting him down was not impossible. There would be sacrifices, yes. But now he was certain. A mere three months had passed, and yet—
He has grown. Far past anything we knew...!
How could a man become that in only three months? Amos could not understand it at all.
"...Yes. That is how one uses Domain, young junior."
Caesar grinned, crooked, and sneered as he took in the shaman's stunned face.
"A man who lives by sweating every single day, without missing one, has no business standing still."
Fitting, for a spell-peddler, that he didn't know something so basic.
Crunch. Lee Han stamped down hard, as if he meant to wring the neck of the mage giving off that foul energy. He did not like, one bit, that the man had been arrogant enough to show killing intent.
Then—
"Enough. Do you mean to start a war?"
"You're the one who turned down my kindness and went for threats first."
"...I am sorry for that."
"Then why do something you've got to apologize for?"
"......"
Creak.
"Somebody shows you goodwill, you're supposed to be grateful. How do you think it feels when you treat it like something you're owed? Well? Answer me, you old shaman."
Lee Han glared at the blind shaman. The look said that the instant he so much as rolled a finger — no, an eye — Lee Han would snap his neck first. The shaman raised both hands and shook his head.
"...What is it you want?"
The shaman could read a room. Rather than an apology, he was offering to move on to something practical, and Lee Han liked that a great deal. He had no wish to waste time on useless talk either.
"If I asked you for the Blood Cross Army's stronghold, would you give it up?"
"......"
"Yeah. Figures that'd be too much."
"But of cour—"
"Then which way is it? The East? The West? Or the North?"
"—?!"
"...Huh. Looking at that face, they've dug in everywhere, haven't they?"
"Th-that is enough..."
The shaman's color drained all over again, and Lee Han shrugged. Sure — set out to learn it all, and he probably could. But it wouldn't do to keep driving the man into a corner. Push too far, and this old man, so convenient for squeezing information out of, might bolt. So Lee Han decided to let the matter pass at a reasonable point, and tossed out another question.
"...You know a mass of monsters has been gathering around here lately?"
"......"
"Well, monsters bunching up isn't all that strange. But a few days back I saw a herd of ogres. A big one."
More than a thousand ogres had been roaming as a pack, and fortunately Lee Han had snapped every last neck among them — but it was an abnormal thing. It had to be. Ogres were not monsters that formed herds. Why else would their other name be Mountain Lord? They were called that because, like tigers, they did not pack together; they reigned alone over a mountain. If Lee Han had not wiped them out, the ogres would without a doubt have smashed villages and cities and eaten everything in reach. Livestock and crops, of course, and—
...every last person.
That was why he wanted to know. Why a thing like this had happened all at once, and whether that shaman might know the reason. And if the shaman turned out to be involved, then—
I'll erase him, whatever it takes!
A pressure like the weight of the deep sea gathered on him, a presence that said he would kill the spell-slinger and the shaman before him both, without fail. Before it, the shaman's face went hard.
And then—
"...At the least, we have worked no scheme where the monsters are concerned."
"......"
".........It is the truth."
The shaman said it like an excuse. An old man making a face that pitiful might have stirred a little sympathy. In Lee Han's case—
"Useless damn shaman."
"......"
—all he did was browbeat the sorry old man, the way a sharp-tongued mother-in-law would.
The blind shaman and the mage left Vulcan.
No. It would be more accurate to say they fled in a panic.
"...Any further talk will bring nothing but loss."
In truth they had slunk off looking wretched, without even properly achieving the purpose for which they had come. Lee Han did not find them pitiful in the slightest.
Quite the opposite.
"Haha! Now that clears the chest!"
Nothing but satisfying. Caesar lavished his praise.
"Heh. They say the pen's mightier than the sword, and damned if this isn't exactly that."
"It only lands because my blade is strong, too."
"Now that's a proper argument!"
As Lee Han said, it had not been done with words alone. If his strength had been lacking, those two would never have turned back so meekly.
"Still, I find it a little odd. A man like you, I thought you'd say you were letting them go with words, then chase them to the end and kill them anyway."
"What do you take me for..."
"Was I wrong?"
"...No. Dead center."
Yes. Just as the man said, even now Lee Han wanted to run them down and cut them apart. The reason he didn't—
I shouldn't dump any more trouble on Vulcan.
In the end, he was a tenant. However generous a landlord's goodwill, start treating that kindness as a right and you would have nothing to say for yourself when you were thrown out. In that same spirit, Lee Han had no desire at all to treat a kindness as if it were his by right.
And there was more.
"That great shaman fellow was strong, wasn't he?"
"Aye, he was strong. But the thorny thing about shamans isn't the strength you can see. The sorcery they keep hidden is the more dangerous part."
Right. He had no confidence a sloppy fight would finish them, and it was not only the great shaman.
That spell-slinger was no small matter either.
Kudan, was it? Lee Han had put him down easily enough, but somehow the one who had looked more dangerous than the blind shaman was that spell-monger, the one who seemed stitched together with insects. A man who gave off a smell of endless danger. Removing him would have been possible, but—
Not here. Not now.
One wrong move, and the spirit mountain itself might be scorched to nothing.
"Tsk. Guess the back-to-the-farm life is over."
Lee Han grumbled. Once the mosquitoes started swarming, a quiet life was as good as finished.
"Farming can wait till you're old. While you're young, you've got to knock about a bit, no? Speaking of which — why not give mercenary work a try?"
"...?"
"Sign on now, and I'll not only pass you the captaincy of the Wolves of the Wild. As a free gift, I'll throw in supreme command of the mercenaries as well."
"......This isn't a buy-one-get-one."
"So. Will you take it?"
"Not buying."
"...Blast."
Lee Han, the Mercenary King.
Doesn't that sound awful?
It didn't suit him in the least.
Lee Han meant it, down to the bone.