Episode 81 — They Should Have Looked Before They Lay Down (3)
Lee Han's warning was quiet, and yet it carried a weight that numbed the legs of anyone who heard it, as if their knees might simply give way.
A low roar, heavy with martial pressure. It does not burst the ear. It makes the air itself grow heavy.
It was one of Lee Han's specialties. Lion's Roar had begun as an art that crushed an opponent beneath a tremendous bellow, but a man who never stopped chasing improvement could grow even here, until the roar no longer needed to be loud. It still could not rupture an eardrum. The drawback lay elsewhere: the art was difficult to control, and even the user's own body turned heavy, as if a mass of lead had been laid across him.
A dull thud answered the pressure. Lee Han had never raised a body so frail that it would fold merely because the air had grown ten times heavier. His expression did not change by a hair. Not a crease. The mercenaries, unlike him, could barely breathe, struggling even to let a breath back out.
He spared them no attention, for all their writhing. Something else had caught him.
Why are they reacting this hard?
If the mercenaries were suffering under the pressure, the demons were another matter. He was only bearing down, and yet their bodies swelled as if they meant to die of it. That was strange. The question had barely formed before he had the answer. A low hum rose through the air.
Ah. So it was this.
Prajna Great Ability — the fighting-energy that belonged to Lee Han alone, born when his life force devoured Holy Power. An alien power, and true to its name: it suppressed and purified whatever belonged to the demonic. That force was answering the demons now, threading itself naturally through his Lion's Roar. Or, in another sense—
A martial roar made to subdue devils — completed. Prajna Great Ability runs through the voice, and demonkind buckles.
Has the true Lion's Roar been completed?
If Lion's Roar was a martial art meant to put devils down, then perhaps he really had finished it. He hadn't meant to.
"Well. It worked."
The result was good, and that was enough. He watched the demons' bodies burst like crushed tomatoes, and smiled, satisfied.
What did I just see?
Oberon Huang, captain of the Oberon mercenary company, shook where he stood, and still his mind kept turning. Fifteen minutes. No — fourteen minutes and twenty-five seconds, to be precise. Barely the time it took to eat a leisurely meal, and what had happened in that span felt as if it denied everything Oberon knew of the world.
His comrades had died. A witch had appeared. Demons had shown themselves. And at the end of it, the demons were dead.
That can't be right!
Even the man who had seen it with his own eyes ended up denying it. It had been too fast. In truth, gathering people after his comrades died had taken about ten minutes, and in the remaining four minutes and twenty-five seconds the witch had died with her skull punched through, and the demons — summoned by her, so far as he could tell — had died as well, leaving nothing but lumps of blood. Tell that to any mercenary he knew, and they would ask if he had lost his mind. Or whether he had been on something. And they would not be entirely wrong. The scene was unreal enough to pass for a drug hallucination.
And yet.
"You there."
"Y-yes, sir!"
"You planning to just stand there?"
"?"
"Well, if you want to die, standing there ought to do it. I just figured you were a little young for that."
"????"
Oberon never got the words what is that supposed to mean out of his mouth. A chill speared through him, and he hit the floor rolling. He went over with a clatter, an unsightly tumble, but there were times when looking like a fool on the ground was the better choice. If one meant to live.
Mouths like the maws of beasts began to open in the inn's walls and floor, and a tremendous stench shook the air.
"C-Captain..."
"Save me...!!"
Crunch. Some of the mercenaries failed to clear those mouths in time. Parts of their bodies were torn away. Heads vanished clean. Three of them died on the spot.
Oberon reeled at his comrades' deaths, and then reeled harder still.
"Wh-what the hell is this!"
Hadn't the demons died?
"Looks like a parasitic monster."
Where Oberon babbled in terror, the other man only muttered, low, as if fitting the thing to knowledge he already had. The demon did not take it quietly.
It raged. Before that rage the stench thickened, and then the smell of sulfur rose until the air was choked with it, and Oberon could not stop retching. Even so, the man in front of the mouths stayed perfectly calm. However sure someone was of his own skill, could he truly be this much at ease?
"No thought of going quietly back to Hell, I take it?"
The witch who had summoned the demons was, astonishingly, the innkeeper's own daughter. Unlike other mystery-races, witches were a people born by way of a human womb. And because of that—
A witch is cast out by humans even if she is never found out. Even her parents give her no affection. Abuse follows as if by nature. So the witch had hated humankind, and hated her own parents most of all — the very ones who had abused her. She had summoned them out of Hell, and she had demanded.
A demon is a being that, in exchange for a human soul, keeps its promise without condition. However vicious the promise, however cruel, it is carried out. The inn groaned and rumbled. The demon's mouths widened, and savage flame shot up, all for the ruin of those who had set themselves against the witch.
"Hmm. So you were walking around in the innkeeper's skin. Didn't know that."
"What?"
"...No, I really was surprised. Why are you getting angry?"
The demon's rage climbed, and it came at him.
What's his problem?
Lee Han only shrugged, wondering why the bastard was so furious. Even as he did, he had to admit it.
That's one hell of a transformation art. I really didn't know.
He had seen at a glance that the serving girl was suspicious. That a demon had been wearing the innkeeper, he had not suspected for a moment. His senses had not rusted. The disguise was simply that good. Well. Things that had walked in human society for thousands of years — tens of thousands, perhaps — would have had time to perfect the art. Utterly indistinguishable from people. He had learned something interesting. And at the same time—
Is this why the South is such a madhouse...?
The more the world fell apart, the more demons ran rampant. If they could put on a human shape that naturally, then becoming the head of a noble house, or of a warlord's host, would be no great feat. He turned the suspicion over — that they might be the ones driving the present chaos faster — and he moved his feet anyway.
Fangs poured at him like machine-gun fire. Not one of them found his body. He could not dodge forever, though. The ground the demon had parasitized was swelling, swallowing more than half the inn. The building creaked and groaned. It had, in effect, become a living thing. Even so, Lee Han took it as it came.
The maid's sleeping just fine.
His ears were turned only toward the room where she snored on, soft and content. How anyone slept through a racket like this was a question, but, well. She was the maid. Still, the room to dodge ran out. A fang finally struck him — and dropped, useless, to the floor with a thin ting.
"Hm."
The demon cocked its head, unsure what it had just seen. Lee Han opened his mouth regardless.
"...I'll say it again. I never meant to fight you. Remember that the ones who showed killing intent first were you."
"It's not nonsense. I can't stand spell-peddlers, but what do I gain by poking a witch and a pack of demons who have nothing to do with me?"
Lee Han was not a good liar. Keep lying, and it becomes a habit; keep at it long enough, and you lie even to yourself. Nor did he kill something merely because the world called it evil. Unless he had met it himself, and unless it turned a blade or a gun on him, he tended to leave it alone. Now, though, it was different.
"You're the ones who handed me a reason."
He drew a long breath and closed his fist. And then, with a grinding creak, the air warped.
The demon saw it. Space, splitting open out of nowhere. A human had only closed his fist. That blank face had only grown a little fiercer. Only that — and everything changed. The demon could not tell what it was looking at. Something dreadful.
The strength hidden in a closed fist slammed down and crushed the demon beneath it.
"One hit."
"I'm going to hit you exactly once, with everything I've got. Swing twice or more, and, well..."
A breath left him.
"—the village might just be gone."
For an instant, the demon felt it. Whether the man had been hiding it on purpose, the demon could not say. But the moment that fist closed and the strength came out, a warrior's caliber showed through. Only a glimpse of it — and still, enough to know. This human was not a being any mere demon could handle.
Pitifully, the demon understood far too late. A shattering crack answered it.
Something pattered down, drip by drip.
"........."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Was there an earthquake last night?"
When the rain stopped and a bright sun came up, the villagers only blinked. They had reason.
"Where'd the inn go?"
More than half the building was gone without a trace. Not only the building. The ground itself had been gouged out, a pit some eight meters deep or more. A sight they could only take for a natural disaster. They wondered what on earth had happened in the night. Had some colossal giant stomped through?
"......I need to retire."
The only mercenaries who knew the truth of that disaster shook as if a tremor had found them, and did nothing but keep their faces pale.
"Did you sleep well last night?"
"Yes! I feel wonderful! People really ought to sleep in a proper bed now and then, hehe."
"I'm glad, then."
"Oh, but Sir Knight, did something happen yesterday? Why was the inn suddenly like that?"
"It's nothing. Don't concern yourself."
"Huh?"
"...Would you like some cheese?"
"Yes, please!"
Lee Han turned the subject with a light hand and played dumb. Better she didn't know.
That bastard. Why was his hide so thin?
He had hit fairly hard, demon or not, but he hadn't expected a single blow to actually finish it. Were demons always that frail? No. That one must simply have been weak. Lee Han decided the thing had been third-rate, and therefore the inn coming down was not his fault. That was how it was.
"Ahem."
His conscience twinged, for some reason. He called it a delusion and quickened his steps. The next village wouldn't be like this. If he could just rest properly there, that would do. Unless the world itself had it in for him, he would not be running into any more demons. He thought positively.
And so, a month later — though the man himself had never intended a bit of it — word rang out across the South.