I'm Not a Knight-Errant. Not a Knight, Either (9)
The strongest knight in the South—the man they called the Sword God, or else the Military God's Champion—had once said it. That he had a fated rival.
A famed general of Britannia, a hero of an age greater than all of Britannia put together. The renowned commander who first gave the Aura User, the Superhuman Baltar Grace, a taste of defeat.
That was why, even now, with something like a year gone by, Lee Han still remembered the name of the man who had made Baltar feel defeat. It had been a fairly striking memory. Even so, he had never kept it deep. Because Baltar had added one thing more.
"He was dead, wasn't he?"
Too dangerous, Baltar had told him, and so he had killed the man with his own hands. That was why Lee Han had not bothered to remember him deeply. What good was there in lingering over someone he could never meet?
And yet.
"Why are you killing a perfectly healthy man and raising a fuss about it?"
"No... Hannibal is dead. I heard it from the man who killed him."
"...Ah. And here I wondered what you were going on about."
Lee Han's remark, which had gone and killed a living man out of nowhere, left Diogenes briefly bewildered—and then he nodded.
"The one you say is dead is likely my great-uncle."
"Great-uncle?"
"You mean General Hannibal, do you not? He was our great-uncle."
"..."
"Well. Great-uncle or not, I have never once seen his face. My father immigrated to Pendragon himself when he was young, met a woman of Pendragon, and had me. So I have only ever heard the name. He is no different from a stranger."
"Ah..."
"Do not make that face. Did I not say he is no different from a stranger? If anything, I count it a fortune that we never met. After my great-uncle died, the royal house of Britannia persecuted Hannibal's blood, and because of it that bloodline quietly vanished as well, or so I am told."
"...My condolences."
"Condolences for what. It is nothing but a past several decades gone. More to the point—you heard it from the man who killed him. So you were a knight of Pendragon."
Diogenes looked plainly more interested in Lee Han's origins than in his own identity. Lee Han, for his part, felt sorry to have poked at something sensitive, though learning who the man was did leave him oddly refreshed.
No wonder he didn't seem ordinary.
From the first meeting he had thought the man was no ordinary person, and hearing that he was of Hannibal's blood made a strange kind of sense. Of course, that did not mean a hero's blood was anything grand in itself. There was a saying—a tiger for a father, a dog for a son. How often was a dog born under a tiger? And this one was not even a direct child, only a relative, so forcing the connection would have been absurd.
Even so.
The way I see it, this old man...
"You are thinking I am the one who inherited the most of Hannibal's blood. Is that it?"
"..."
"That face says you are wondering how I read your thoughts. It is written all over your eyes. How could I fail to know?"
"...Uh."
"Heh heh. It is not mind-reading. I am only reading the flicker at the corner of the eye, and the air about a man. Nothing but a trifling trick."
"...Could you please stop opening your mouth?"
"I am sorry, but that will not do. It has been a week since I had anyone to talk to, so I am glad of it. Leave me to chatter a little longer."
"...Ugh."
Lee Han scratched the back of his head, wondering if this was how it felt to be the one whose thoughts got read.
Thanks to the compass, Lee Han was making his way out of the space without much trouble.
"Coming in, I'm sure it only took a moment."
He had entered in under three minutes. He had already been walking for thirty. It felt like going in circles.
"Do not doubt the compass. A space steeped in hell-qi is no different from an otherworld. It would not even be strange to drift in one for a lifetime."
"No, I don't think that's it. If there weren't ordinary people up above, I'd just smash the whole thing and walk out."
"...?"
"Something like that."
By instinct, Lee Han felt that if he truly put his full strength into breaking this space, he could. He held back only because he could not begin to guess how much damage that would do—not because he felt any fear of the space itself, or any sense of being closed in.
And so, rather than a damned hole like this—
"So. You feeling any better?"
"Thanks to you, I am catching my breath."
"Meaning you're still not all right."
—worrying about the man in front of him seemed the more productive use of his time.
Diogenes's condition was serious. Surviving more than a week in this pitch-dark space without eating or drinking a thing was already a crisis, though he said, surprisingly, that he had solved that particular part with Holy Law.
Earth Turtle
The name alone made it sound like a shabby little Holy Law, but it was what they called the ultimate art of survival. By regulating the metabolism and the movement of the heart, it let a man last at least three weeks without water or food, and as long as two months. A cheat of a Holy Law. It was, in effect, a superior version of the Turtle-Breath Great Art, and a method even Lee Han could not help but admire.
He could use the Turtle-Breath Great Art himself, but...
Even I top out at ten days, if that.
Holy Law really was something. It really was.
...And yet Holy Law was not all-powerful. Set the starving aside, and Diogenes's condition was still grave. That much was true.
"The concern is appreciated. My belly may be run through, but so long as I do not die, that is enough."
"...You're an optimist."
He could not say whether it had happened on the way in, but there was the mark of a blade driven into Diogenes's abdomen. Holy Law seemed to have stopped the infection and kept the wound from worsening, yet that was only a stopgap. It was the sort of injury that would not have been strange if it killed him at any moment. For now Lee Han had fed him a potion and given him the dried rations and water he carried, and the man had recovered a little—but had Lee Han arrived even a day later...
"I was lucky. I very nearly went to Avalon for real."
"I won't deny it."
He said it like a joke. In truth, Diogenes had come right up to Avalon's door.
"You're a man of real caliber yourself, mister."
"Caliber, he says. More to the point, it looks as though it will be some time yet before we are out. Let us have a productive conversation, you and I."
"What kind of productive conversation?"
"What else? The circus troupe."
"..."
It did sound as if it would be a productive conversation.
"How much did you find out?"
"Not a great deal. All I can claim to have learned is that the suspicious circus lot are damned bastards, and that the lord is one of them."
"That's already a lot."
Certain at last that his suspicions had not been wrong, Lee Han clicked his tongue. These damned bastards. They really were pulling exactly the kind of stunt they would.
"And a way to deal with it?"
"There will be a way. I have one measure roughly in mind."
"One, huh. That's impressive. If it were me, I don't think I could come up with even one."
Going through all this trouble to come and save him had been the right choice. He could not have been more relieved—
"However."
"?"
"...I do not know whether any time remains in which to save them."
"What?"
"I am not scolding you for arriving late, nor do I resent you. This is simply a calamity too dreadful for any one man to hold back."
"..."
"Tsk. That count is a strange one, besides. He might simply have lived like a king in this domain and been done with it. What could he possibly find so fine about offering up his own family, and all his people, to a demon?"
"...What?"
"What is the matter?"
"I... think I might have misheard that last part."
For an instant Lee Han doubted his own ears and asked again, and Diogenes let out an ah, waving the matter off with a little gesture as he spoke.
"You did not know, I see. I thought you would already."
"...I only arrived in this domain today. How would I know all that?"
"You looked capable. I assumed you knew."
"Is that an insult, or a compliment?"
"A compliment."
Fwoosh—.
All at once the compass's light flared, as if to say this was the place to stop, and Lee Han nodded.
"We ought to be able to get outside now."
"And I still have a great deal to say."
"You can say it once we're out."
"Hm. Will there truly be time for that, I wonder?"
"...Have you never heard that words sow the seeds of disaster?"
"I feel as though I might have?"
Grumbling at him to watch his mouth, Lee Han took a step. And in the next moment, as the murky air of hell-qi vanished and clean air wrapped around him—
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
"...?"
A hail of hidden weapons broke over him like a burst of gunfire.
"Don't stop! Keep firing!!"
At the lord's command, the soldiers loosed their weapons.
Thuk-thuk-thuk-thuk!
Mechanical repeating crossbows—and ones that fired on the explosive force of gunpowder. Their power was enough to punch through a wild boar's thick hide in a single shot. Boar or brown bear, take a few dozen bolts and the beast would come apart without a fragment of bone left behind.
In truth, it was too cruel a weapon, the sort that ought not to be used save in war. For a lord to possess such things privately was illegal besides. And yet Count Deniro committed the crime of fielding them without a moment's hesitation, and his soldiers, sick at heart though they were, had no choice but to shoot the crossbows. It was an order.
Even so.
Is this right?
Was this not far too much? They must already have fired thousands of bolts. No—tens of thousands, easily. And still he told them not to stop, to keep firing... Waste did not begin to cover it.
KRRRUMBLE!
At a certain moment the underground prison, hammered by the bolts the soldiers poured into it, began to break and give off an ominous sound. The underground had already been unstable, its walls collapsing, and the use of these gunpowder weapons only drove that instability harder.
Watching it—
"M-my lord...!"
"Damn it!"
Giovanni and Corin, pinned down hard, could only be sick of the sight. However strong he might be, an attack like that would leave him with no answer at all. They could not hide their despair. And then—
—BOOOOM!!
What they saw in the next instant was soldiers hurled a good meter through the air by a sudden, savage blast of wind, the lord driven into the ground, and—
"—What the hell kind of mess is this, the second I step out?"
There he stood, nothing but his clothes torn, not a scratch on him, fist thrust out.
"F-fire!"
Humiliatingly planted in the dirt, Count Deniro gave the order again all the same, and the soldiers, flinching, still raised their crossbows by reflex and shot. Even in utter panic, a commander's order served as their guide. The count was showing that he was not wholly incompetent, and the crossbows breathed fire once more and flew without mercy—
BOOOOOOM!!
Thud. Thud...
This time, the soldiers lost the will to fight for good. The wall of ferocious wind born of a single, incomparably violent fist slammed into them and broke not only the crossbows, but their hearts along with them. And the man who had shattered their fighting spirit entirely was kind enough to tell them what he had done.
"They call it the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist."
One hundred and twenty meters. Or, to put it so the people of the South would understand—
"You'd do well not to think of running anywhere inside a radius of 131.23 yards."
A knight kind enough to convert the distance for them. With that, he threatened the lord and the soldiers alike.
If they wanted to live, they had better learn to read the room.