The Fair Instructor (2)
Day twenty.
Twenty days had already passed since the students of the sword faculty climbed Vulcan. Twenty days, too, since they had begun a training that truly put their lives on the line.
Stake their lives. Anyone who only heard the phrase would have called it an exaggeration. Anyone who had watched their training from the first hour to the last would not have doubted it for a moment. Their drills had been that harsh, and that desperate.
"Ghhk—!"
"Climb! We have to climb! Fall from here and we're dead...!"
Once the first week of training was behind them, they had attempted a cliff climb for the first time in their lives. The PT Drill had, for once, ended inside two hours, and they had barely finished wondering at the mercy of it before they understood. It had ended early so they could climb this.
They had to groan and strain their way up a cliff of dizzying height, every sense in the body drawn tight as wire. One slip meant death, or a body that would never be whole again. They were not ready to die. They climbed with everything they had—no. They climbed shedding tears and blood, wretchedly, inch by inch.
In truth, the only ones to finish that first ascent were the three assistant instructors and Roen. The rest fell somewhere along the way and came through unhurt only because Irene Windler, waiting at the foot of the cliff, caught them with telekinesis. That was the sum of the first climb. Four more days passed before every last one of them succeeded.
And once they had all reached the top—
Something dropped at their feet with a soft thud.
"From now on, when you climb the cliff, you wear this pack."
No one answered.
The instructor was a demon. There was no other explanation. How else could a man tell them to climb a cliff with sandbags on their backs? They could not bring themselves to argue, in part because they had already been trained out of defying his orders. There was another reason too.
"The instructor will demonstrate first. Follow properly."
If they shouldered sandbags of ten kilograms, that man was already on the rock with a hundred. And after climbing like that, he came back down and climbed again with them, over and over. What complaint could they possibly show?
There was not a single sprout among the students who had not already been helped by him.
Nine days more passed that way. Only then did they manage the climb on their own, sandbags and all.
"You all did well. We can start easing off the drills. Even without them, I'd say you've learned how to wring the strength out of a muscle."
Praise, arriving only today, on the twentieth day, nearly dragged tears out of them. It was not moving because they no longer had to hear that loathsome, hateful whistle. It was moving because he had acknowledged them. That alone was reason enough to cry, and everyone who had trained through those days would have agreed.
And well they might. The instructor had always trained beside them. However horrific the exercise, he had never once stood idle. He stayed to the end. He always worked ten times harder than they did.
And he kept helping us. Again and again.
He always went down the mountain and brought the food back up.
He even turned in the reports that stood in for our lectures... wait. Does that one not count as a favor?
...There isn't a kind of help we didn't receive.
They were learning what an example was, and why a person comes to hold respect for someone else. He was, without question, a man worth that respect. To them, at least.
So it was now, with twenty days behind them. A private complaint or two might linger, but not one of them carried resentment or hatred toward him. He had not ground them down with violence. He had governed them by example. How were they supposed to resent that? They were not beasts.
"From here on, aside from the morning run, you will see to your own basic conditioning. The instructor doesn't need to show you anymore. All of you can manage it yourselves."
"Is... is that really true?"
"What would I gain by lying? The instructor has already drilled the methods into you. From now on you do it on your own. Whether you choose to, or fail to, is what will decide the days ahead."
Silence held for a breath.
"In any case, don't grow lazy on me. Don't give the instructor cause to be ashamed he taught you."
Another silence—and then they drove their heels into the dirt and roared, every one of them, with their whole hearts in it.
"Set them beside what they were twenty days ago, and their bodies have come an astonishing way."
"Anyone who knew those brats wouldn't believe it. You'd wonder if they were even the same people."
That was Arno and Garand, talking as they watched. Twenty days ago, give those students the best of it and they had been nothing but low-rank mercenaries. Mayfly lives. No telling which morning would be the one that killed them. Now they were no longer low-rank at all.
"Mid-rank. Hell, if they catch a good day, upper mid-rank."
Their bodies had changed, but their presence was the stranger thing: the bearing of veteran mercenaries. And Garand was not measuring them against some merely decent company. He was measuring them against the men of the Wild Wolves, that legendary mercenary company. The comparison alone said how high his appraisal sat.
"I think they could make a fine match of it against my house's own disciples."
The young lord of Offen, the sword house that kept more disciples than any other in the kingdom, had reached the same conclusion. Arno was already turning it over in earnest—whether, once he went home, he ought to bring Lee Han's lessons into the house.
Then—
"Still, not yet. Bare body, kill a bear? Not enough."
"...Kunta's standards are a little strange."
"Kunta's tribe, the children. Kill a bear, or a crocodile, or one monster. Then the tribe calls you warrior. Become warrior, shaman not scary. But sprouts not there yet. Fight a shaman now, still cannot win. Sprouts still weak."
"...Mm."
The speech was clumsy, but both of them could more or less follow it, and both nodded. They understood that the shaman he meant was a mage. They also understood the verdict underneath it: twenty days of tempering was still not enough.
But—
"Then we start filling in what's missing. From now."
Lee Han had been listening to all of it, and he answered as if the matter were already settled. Every face turned to him with expectation wound as tight as it would go.
"Chick No. 2."
"Yes, yes!"
"Bring those over."
"Understood."
Irene Windler obeyed as if the order were familiar. Her time as an assistant had taught the two of them to read each other; he no longer had to point and name a thing for her to know what he wanted. Secretly, she was rather proud of that.
The ground shuddered. A considerable number of trees—dead or rotten ones, uprooted or cut and piled together—came down with a heavy thud.
"Touch them later and you'll feel it, but this wood is extremely hard. Dead and rotten, yes. They still grew by surviving Vulcan's brutal climate. It would be strange if they weren't hard."
No one needed to touch them. The hardness was plain to the eye, and so was the sheer size, and a faint, uncanny energy clung to the timber. If dead wood was like this, how hard were the trees of Vulcan that were still alive? Awe at the Mystery of the mana the mountain kept rose in them all over again.
"Well, don't scare yourselves. I didn't show you this to break your spirits. But you need to understand something. The breed called spell-mongers is a breed that can move timber this heavy alone."
The students flinched as one.
He had not made Irene Windler haul the trees because he was feeling lazy. He had shown them. He had shown them what people who bore the Mystery called mana could do—people who kept, in a spell-world, a power no one else could understand.
"A ton and a half, at the least. Which brings me to you, Chick No. 2. Was lifting this easy?"
"W-well, it was a little tricky, you know? Telekinesis is... how do I put it. You wrap the whole tree in mana and lift it that way."
"How many could you lift?"
"If I really committed, about four?"
"Hm. I see."
Irene said something outrageous in a perfectly calm voice, and Lee Han accepted it as a matter of course. The students went cold listening to the two of them talk as if none of it were remarkable. Four trees, lifted at will. Six tons, near enough. To handle a mass like that however one pleased... They were reminded, again, that mages were not called objects of terror for nothing. A one-person army. Even alone, they were people who could seize the shape of a battlefield and bend it.
But—
"Don't flinch, you lot."
Lee Han scolded them, unruffled. It was a rebuke that said their training so far would be wasted if they wilted now. Only then did the students raise their heads, and they caught the instructor's smile—clear, and utterly sure of itself.
"Right. It probably feels even more unfair than you expected. They can throw around a mass like that whenever they like, and they handle all sorts of unexpected mysterious power on top of it. Chick No. 2. Can you handle fire as well?"
"Mm, it isn't really my specialty. I opened my spell-world on water and wind, so..."
It was an astonishing thing to say. Had there been a mage present, the color would have drained from that mage's face. Ordinary mages possessed a single attribute and made their living selling that one thing. She had just claimed both. A double. A trait astonishing enough to belong to an Archmage.
The man who hated magic, and who had very little interest in how impressive mages were, only looked bored.
"Enough chatter. Can you, or can't you?"
He wanted the conclusion and nothing else.
"I-it would take time, but I could manage it, I think?"
"Then put fire-mana on that tree and throw it at me. As hard as you can."
"...Pardon?"
"Don't ask again. Quickly."
"...Yes."
Her reluctance was written all over her face, but she did as she was told. Flame roared up. In an instant the tree lifted into the air and was swallowed in fire.
Irene Windler. The mage known as the genius of the century, judged unlikely to see a talent equal to hers appear within the next hundred years. A gift fit to stand for an age, and this was why so many eyes had already found her. Now a mage of that gift poured her mana in without stint and incanted fire.
It was menacing. The raw heat of the flames was bad enough, but fire fed on mana burned at an entirely different density. In that moment the blazing log was no longer merely a log on fire. It had become a great spear bearing the mana of flame. Calling it a siege weapon would not have been an exaggeration.
And a weapon like that—
"Y-you're serious? I really throw it?"
"Quit stalling. Throw it at full power."
Irene Windler swallowed dryly and obeyed. She truly used everything she had. She packed every drop of her mana into the telekinesis, and the force of it swelled past the point where it could be called back. The thing howled through the air.
Who knew that being able to see the growth rings could be so frightening? This was not the pressure of a bell struck to announce the new year. It was the pressure of something that might punch clean through a great temple bell.
Even against that oncoming spear of fire, Lee Han did not yield an inch. He looked only forward, and he spoke as he settled into place.
"A trained human body is tough. But most people have no idea how to use the strength a tough body holds."
His foot drove hard into the earth and locked there, as if he meant to show them he would not retreat by so much as a hair.
"But depending on how force flows—on how you handle that force, and how you apply it—even this becomes possible."
Without hesitation he put a turn through his body and threw his fist. A straight punch. Clean, composed, textbook, and more solid than any stance had a right to be. Rotation caught along his frame, and a vortex formed around him. He extended the fist. Could so simple an act really be that grand? And in the next instant the punch and the great spear met.
By common sense, by the laws of physics, a human body ought to have been blown away or torn apart. But what broke, with a splitting crack, was not the man of flesh and blood. It was the wood, hard beyond reason.
"I-it split in half?"
No one else could speak.
"Am I dreaming..."
Not one of them would have sworn they had blinked, and still they could not believe it. For a moment they wondered if this was even real. It was a sight that refused belief. The man who had performed that unbelievable miracle shook out a hand without a scratch on it and turned to face them.
"Using strength—throwing a punch—is this. Well. I'm still clumsy at it myself."
The declaration was so absurd that a hollow laugh escaped before anyone could stop it.
"...Does that punch have a name of its own?"
Roen asked it evenly. Unlike his usual tone, though, a thin thread of expectation and nerves ran underneath. Lee Han answered with the name of the height he meant this fist to reach someday.
"Hundred-Pace Divine Fist."
For now it was the name of a painfully incomplete punch, able to strike only what lay within ten paces—nowhere near a hundred.