I Am Knight Lee Han
Dawn had not yet broken.
The taverns that kept late hours still had not closed their doors, and this was only just the hour when the farmers began to creep from their beds and make for the fields.
Huff, huff! A dull tearing of the air—thud, thud-thud—rang down the street alongside a rough breathing that had no business belonging to this hour. Someone might well have suffered the illusion that a horse was galloping past. The presence rolling off the runner was that far from ordinary.
And yet.
"Sir Knight, out running again today?"
"Diligent as anything, aren't you."
"Give it your all!"
For the farmers, rising at first light was simply the shape of a day, and they sent their cheers toward the man's ferocity—the very thing that blew the last fog of sleep clean off them. However industrious a person might be, the same day repeating without end had a way of grinding down the spirit, and the sight of this man sweeping that weariness and boredom aside was, for them, a considerable pleasure and a considerable jolt.
The women, most of all.
"My, the indecency."
"If you're going to talk, at least cover your eyes."
"If my husband looked like that, well, I wouldn't complain. Hehe."
"...Is that a man, or a beast?"
They made a show of shielding their eyes while taking in everything there was to see, stealing sidelong glances at the half-stripped man and drawing a proper measure of life's vitality from the view. The men, for their part, sometimes stared at that body with open envy and took a great shock from it themselves. In a way, it seemed a phenomenon that did both sides some good.
"Huff... huff...!"
The man offered the farmers who greeted him nothing warmer than a nod. It wasn't that he was unkind. He was taking the work seriously, and he had no attention to spare for answering them. The farmers knew it, and they didn't mind. If anything—
"Have a bit of this later!"
An apple came flying. He caught it lightly without so much as a glance back, and raised a hand in a wave. Thanks. The farmer who had thrown it looked thoroughly satisfied.
"What a character."
"A knight living out in the Outer Farm Ward—now that's a rare sight."
"That it is. Heh heh."
Three years. Rain or snow, not a single day missed. Watching a man run like that, there wasn't a soul who didn't want to cheer him on. Whatever his goal might be...
"Mark my words. He's going to be someone great."
The farmer believed it to the bone.
"—I mean it. This year, I am handing in my resignation!"
Crunch! The man—no, Lee Han—bit a great chunk out of the apple and put the fire into himself once again. The goal was resignation. Retirement. He was dying to get out.
Lee Han ran again today. Not merely ran. The goal was twenty kilometers, finished inside an hour—and that did not mean sprinting blindly as fast as he could. The standard was to hold a steady pace for the full hour, and sandbags hung from his wrists and ankles. Exactly ten kilograms apiece. They piled more burden onto the body. Sometimes he ran in armor as well.
Thud. Thud. Perhaps because of it, the ground boomed with every stride and the strain doubled, but he wasted no thought on the weight. He simply drove his body on. The running was finished. Plenty remained.
"Huff."
A pull-up bar stood in one corner of the empty lot. Lee Han took hold of it.
"Hup!"
A pull-up. Chin-ups, as they were called. He set his form and rose and fell without rest. Biceps, lats, the erectors along the spine—countless other muscles twitched under the stimulus, and he sharpened his focus until he could feel their movement down to the finest degree. This was the body he used. These were the muscles inside it. He had to think, and think again, about how a muscle was spent, when it took a harder stimulus, and how to put that to work. Simply growing stronger would never be enough.
Even if I can't carve my movements down to the comma the way that monster does, it's enough if I forge a body strong enough to take that man's single blow!
So long as there was a goal, the thinking could not stop. At some point he wedged a twenty-kilogram sandbag between his legs, strapped thirty kilograms across his back, and climbed again, and the stimulus—and the trembling of the muscle—grew dramatically sharper.
Creak. Groan. A bar had no business screaming, and yet before an unbroken hour of high-intensity pull-ups even the iron seemed to sway. ...Or did it? Was he putting in so much force that he was bending it himself?
"...Even strength ought to know when to ease off."
Even he suspected he had been throwing his weight around a bit too crudely. Lee Han slackened and came down to the ground. When the pull-ups—ninety minutes of them—finally ended, sweat rose off him like steam and heat surged up. It pooled beneath him. Every muscle had been wrung to its limit and shivered. Running without rest, cinching the body without rest, he had at last driven himself into overload. It was as if to demonstrate a natural law: however sturdy a knight's body might be, push it past a certain point and it breaks.
"Nnngh!"
He loosened himself with a few stretches and showed no intention of actually resting. If anything, he shouldered one of the logs strewn across the yard as if it were a barbell. A hundred kilograms across the shoulders was burden enough, but Lee Han went one better and dropped into a low stance.
Thud! A squat. Nothing forged the lower body better, and nothing was more miserable. Hold the seated position, then rise. Repeat. At some point a pain like his thighs catching fire rolled through him, and he did not stop. It had been the same with the pull-ups. Lee Han did strength work the way one did cardio, and cardio the way one did strength work—a crude method, and one any expert would have judged a deliberate attempt to destroy the body.
Thud! After seventy minutes of squats that amounted to harsh torture, he set the log down with care. He wanted to hurl it. If it broke, though, he would have to go hunting for another, so reason had to win out over the immediate relief.
"Kehck!"
The cough tasted of iron. An internal injury. The training had gone past excessive into madness; not getting hurt would have been the stranger outcome. No prestigious knightly house trained this stupidly. They kept professional healers or priests on standby, or used the house's secret medicines to mend wounds and restore stamina, steering the work in a stable direction. What Lee Han was doing was self-torture in the guise of training. Self-harm that ruined the body. Crude? No. This was simply insane.
But he had not undertaken training of this order because he was truly mad, or because he couldn't think. On the contrary.
"The recovery, at least, really is like a troll's."
He did the mad thing because he had something to lean on. Without a thought of seeking a priest, he began forcing down the food in his pack.
Munch. Munch. He chewed with genuine diligence—not swallowing it whole, but breaking it down fine, intent on absorbing every last nutrient. What he ate was this: a kilogram of chicken, skin stripped and boiled in water, of course; broccoli and nuts; potatoes, cabbage, and the like, boiled and steamed. The healthiest of health food. It had no taste. Salt and seasoning had gone in at the bare minimum. He ate to stay healthy, not for the flavor.
And yet, as if some vanishingly rare recovery potion had been sprinkled over the meal in place of seasoning, his body knit itself back together. Creak. Crack. The trembling left his muscles. Color began to return to a face that had gone deathly pale. It didn't show on the outside, but the aching knees and the internal injury that had felt ready to burst were healed in a breath as well.
That recovery called to mind nothing so much as the regeneration of some dreadful monster—the terror of the forest, sometimes called a man-eating fiend. A troll. The recovery of a creature like that. And the comparison was exact. Among the monster factors he had gained through countless experiments after a mage captured him long ago, one was none other than a troll's.
Not, of course, a troll's recovery in full. A severed neck or a severed arm would not simply stick back on and regrow. Swift healing through nutrients, and a sturdy endurance: that was the whole of what he possessed. Still, had the sort of people who lived and died in a gym been standing here, they would have envied the ability past envy and into spite. Nutrients, once eaten, were absorbed into the body at speed—absorption that became blood and flesh on the spot. Take an external wound or an internal one, and he could restore it at once. For building a body, it was plainly the finest gift there was.
"Hoooo...!"
Confirming that his stamina and every aching pain had been restored and healed, Lee Han rose. Three hours remained before he had to report for duty. He drew his sword. Steel slid free with a thin ring, and he swung—whoosh, whiiish.
The kingdom's basic sword art: a foundational form that cut the eight directions in sequence, a technique even a child could learn. Lee Han could have performed it with his eyes closed by now, could have unfolded it freely on imagination alone. He did not blink. He did not let the sword's path, or its tip, slip from him by a fraction. How was he swinging? How did the body that wielded his blade spend its strength? What would it take to draw out still greater power, greater destructive force, greater agility? He ran through the forms in order amid a hundred such questions, searching for a way to advance.
And as the movements went on, the change came. His sword—nothing more than an ordinary longsword—grew, past a certain point, fast and keen enough to tear the wind. Later still it grew so fast that even the sound of cut air vanished, and only the silver line gleaming along the edge barely announced that the blade was moving at all. Pik. Piik. Dust billowed with every swing, and sword-scars bit into the earth.
Then the last. He stamped hard, gathered every scrap of strength in his body, and swung. The packed ground burst as if something had exploded beneath it, leaving a hollow like a small crater. Soil and shards of stone that the shock had flung skyward rattled back down, raking over him and leaving him filthy. Even so—
"...Can't I swing it any harder than this?"
Satisfaction still seemed a stranger to him. He only scowled. The road to retirement was long, and it was rough.