A Knight Hates Exams (1)
Swish. Swish.
"There! Spotless!"
The maid's single brown braid sat well with the fine cut of her uniform, and the innocent-looking girl smiled, bright and refreshed, at the house she had just put in order.
She had scrubbed until the floors squeaked under the cloth, and the work seemed to have rinsed her mood clean along with them.
She tripped over nothing and spilled mistakes wherever she went, but for sheer diligence she yielded to no one—and that maid was none other than Layla Winter.
The trouble was that she was just as gifted at turning a person's stomach inside out by failing to catch a single word that was said to her. Insults and curses, however, never landed. A head full of flowers meant she didn't even notice she had been sworn at, and was inclined to take whatever she heard in the kindest light. In a sense, her nerve might have been tougher than that of most mercenaries and knights.
"Miss Maid."
"Lady Irene, you're here!"
"I-I keep telling you, just Irene is fine."
"Hehe, this is easier for me. Wait a little. We'll eat lunch soon!"
"Ah. Yes."
It was a rare day off, yet Irene Windler had come to the knight's cabin at first light. By now, though, the girl's visits were hardly different from daily life. Somewhere in the course of learning the curtsey and the rest of the royal etiquette from Layla, the two of them had become people who ate together, and at some point it had come to feel natural to Irene Windler as well.
Ah. This is nice...
"Arin. Don't you think you've got no conscience at all? Breakfast and dinner every day, and you never pay a coin. I didn't raise you like this."
"Wh-who raised whom! And I'm not eating for free. I bring gifts sometimes. That's enough, isn't it?"
"Those gifts are all things the Duke sent."
"......"
"You shouldn't wrap up someone else's gift and pass it off as your own."
"...Rotten ghost."
Beaten with nothing but the facts. Wicked, through and through.
But Irene Windler's conscience was beside the point. Neither Layla nor the owner of the cabin was the sort to take her to task over it. And when one considered that every gift she occasionally brought was a luxury fit for a royal household, a few meals given in exchange were, if anything, a gain for them. Not that either of them was the type to chase a gain like that.
"Come to think of it, the instructor..."
Crack!
"Ah. There he is."
The moment she tried to find the man she couldn't see, his presence struck her. From one side of the backyard came the sound of air being split.
The latch clicked. Irene stepped out the back door and, as always, found the knight training as if the world depended on it.
Crack!!
"...He's practicing something strange again today."
"That's not telekinesis, is it?"
"Incredible. Could that be the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist?"
"I always think this, but the names of his techniques are a little odd."
"They are, aren't they? Hmm. They almost seem like Chinese characters...?"
She was a possessed girl, yes, but she was also a third-year who had walked no road but the college entrance exam, a girl who had never so much as seen a martial-arts novel, let alone an ordinary comic or a film. All she could do was stare at his technique in wonder. She never even realized that a countryman of hers stood right in front of her.
The firewood stood like dominoes. Eight inches separated each log, and there were some thirty of them in the row. Lee Han faced that row.
"Seven."
Crack!
"Eleven."
Pop!
"Nine."
A clean slice.
"...Done."
Lee Han smiled, pleased. From seven in the morning until noon he had tried without stopping, and at last he had succeeded once. For him, that single success was all that mattered.
Strike the Mountain, Hit the Ox. A method of striking a foe unbound by distance or by the space between. The Hundred-Pace Divine Fist he had shown the day before could be said to have come from this principle. He was pushing further, laboring to unfold that same principle through the sword. And today, at last, he had succeeded in loading the method not with fist-force, but with sword-force.
The proof was a sword-mark on the log in the ninth place. The others felt, at best, as if they had been struck. Only the ninth felt as if a blade had drawn across it—the keen edge of a sword, delivered. Simply turning that sensation over in his mind was, for Lee Han, a greater strength than anything else.
What matters is that it worked.
This was generally how the sense of a technique came to him. He tried until it worked. No fixed term, and blindly, countless times in a single day. Doing so still succeeded less than one time in ten, but the techniques won that way were what had made him who he was. So the joy was pure. The joy of unfolding, with his own hands, a technique that until now had lived only in imagination.
Next is the Cloud-Dragon Eight Forms.
If he could change direction some eight times in midair, maybe the thing would even land on Baltar.
Then came a footstep.
"Practicing another grotesque technique, I see."
"You're here?"
He had felt the presence for some time already, and the sudden third party didn't startle him. No wonder. It was a face he saw all the time. And the man himself—
"Have you eaten lunch? I baked some pie."
"Oh."
Jake Parman. The only colleague Lee Han had in the knight order, and the one man he could call an acquaintance.
Crunch.
Savory and sweet at once, the apple pie cracked between his teeth. The crispness ran even through the whole of it, the balance of flavor exactly where it ought to be. Excellent. Better still was the bite of the apple filling, astonishingly good—not a mere jam, but something startlingly fresh, with the faint scent of cinnamon and ginger laid over it like a last brushstroke. It was a work of art. Praise rose on its own.
Lee Han had already finished the meal Layla set out, and he had already put away five meat pies and seven apple pies, and still he went on eating as if the hunger hadn't loosened, heaping praise on every bite.
"Just quit your real job and open a pie shop. Talent like that is wasted."
"Is that something you say to a knight?"
"Then don't be this good at it. Why does a noble cook like this?"
"Because I'm a fallen noble."
"If falling made everyone cook this well, the world would be full of chefs."
"...I wanted to feed my younger siblings something good, and the skill came along with it."
"......The backstory's insane."
Lee Han shook his head. Meat pie and apple pie. Those two ideal things had, unbelievably, come from the hands of the knight in front of him. Born to a fallen house, he had grown up without attendants and ended up cooking for himself, or so he said. Perhaps that was why Jake Parman's cooking was superb—a flavor hard to find even in a proper restaurant, and in the judgment of a man whose palate had grown keen whether he liked it or not, nothing short of the finest pie there was.
For the record, Lee Han had also eaten meat pie and apple pie made by the royal chefs. Which meant the bastard made better pie than the royal kitchen. An ill-starred aptitude, buried under a knight's talent. A pity.
"If you weren't a knight and ran a restaurant, you'd already be wildly successful. You might even have built a place to rival a great merchant company."
"Stop talking nonsense. Business isn't easy. And how is a single restaurant supposed to grow to the scale of a great company? That's absurd."
"Well. It might be possible."
Drop in the idea of a franchise and it would succeed without fail—but is that still a foreign notion in this world?
He nearly explained it, for the sake of his one relatively human friend's success, then swallowed the words. He knew the man was a knight down a single road for life. He ate the apple pie instead. All twelve vanished in a blink.
"So why bake pie and come all the way out here?"
"...You're asking that now?"
"My stomach's full."
"Shameless."
"Next time I want quiche."
"I should have kept my mouth shut..."
Jake clicked his tongue, shameless as his friend always was. Even so, he couldn't quite hide a pleased look, as if he liked that the man ate what he had made so cleanly and called it good. He didn't know it himself, but cooking gave him more satisfaction than a knight's work ever did.
"Ahem. Two things brought me this far. The first is the illegal mages you hauled in this time."
"No idea what you're talking about."
"Don't play dumb. Two corpses have already been found. And the traces there were unmistakably yours. The captain was certain."
"......"
Lee Han's brow drew tight.
So that's how he staged it.
The regressor, to the very end, had meant to keep himself off the stage and hand the credit to Lee Han. He had surely left some of those five bugs—already corpses—somewhere the knight order was bound to notice them. Take the reward, the gesture said. Only that wasn't the credit Lee Han had wanted. He had never meant to chase fame in the first place. And as if Jake knew as much—
"Still, I know your style, so we've decided to bury the fact that you dealt with them. You don't particularly want to show yourself. ...And it wouldn't do for you to become a target of the illegal mages."
"You do know me."
A competent coworker was a fine thing to have. They quietly settled the headaches in advance, so the headaches never arrived.
"Even so, the reward will come through. A medal, too, if you want one."
"Forget the medal. Tell them to pay me in money."
"......"
"What?"
"Nothing. Just thinking that time really doesn't change you."
"People don't change easily."
"That... is true."
Jake nodded, as if it certainly seemed so, and drank the tea Layla had brought.
"You really haven't changed. That money—you're going to give it away again, aren't you?"
"......What are you talking about?"
Lee Han answered a beat late and shrugged, as if he hadn't the faintest idea. But Jake knew. That money would not be going into Lee Han's pocket.
...The coin he takes off mages and slave caravans, he hands to the victims. Of all things.
Very few people knew the truth of the secret work Lee Han did, and Jake was one of them. He knew that Lee Han had used the knight order's intelligence net to erase large-scale slavers and illegal mages. The knowledge had come of keeping the man company and passing him information now and then. He knew, further, where the fortunes seized in that work had gone.
A fellow who can't be honest.
Every coin taken from slavers and illegal mages, Lee Han had given away free to those who had been kidnapped or dragged in as test subjects, on the grounds that it was money he didn't particularly want. And because of that, he couldn't even stack merit. By law, property seized from illegal mages or slave caravans was supposed to be recovered by the state. Lee Han had broken that law. He had scattered the entire fortune among the victims and the families of the dead.
Could I do that?
The money torn from them would be beyond imagining. Report it to the knight order, and he would already have shot up the ranks at a staggering pace. But he kept neither the money nor the merit—because it sat wrong with him, because he had no need of the credit. He simply threw it out in the hope it might do the victims some good. And as Jake saw it, the man was not refusing fortune and merit merely because they sat wrong. He moved as his conscience moved him, and lived as if eating and getting by were enough. The proof was the frugal cabin he lived in, without a single complaint.
Truly.
A man who wouldn't spare a thought for chivalry...
was practicing chivalry in earnest.
Jake let out a thin snort at the irony.
"I don't think the captain will let you go. Not to the end."
"Don't say horrible things."
"Well..."
In the captain's place, he wouldn't have wanted to lose a knight that exemplary either.
A warm, lukewarm air hung between them for a moment, but what was warmth good for between two men? They slipped back into their usual state soon enough and went on.
"The next thing is this. Grand Duke Lionel has come into the Royal Capital."
"I heard that. He's still in the capital?"
After the War Game he hadn't felt the man's presence, and he had assumed the grand duke had gone back north. Still here, then?
"He must have business left. Well, he'll return before long. The Grand Duke isn't a man who leaves the North empty for long."
"And why tell me?"
"Because your disciple is a leading candidate to inherit the grand ducal house. He may approach you."
"Damn it."
The interest of the high and mighty was the last thing he wanted, and the world never obliged.
"If he approaches, it'll be within the month. There's no better time for the Grand Duke to move than now."
"...A good time?"
What was that supposed to mean? Lee Han blinked, wearing a face that said he didn't understand, and Jake, for his part, was speechless—a look that asked how he could possibly not know.
"...There's the semester evaluation."
"......Ah."
"I should have kept my mouth shut..."
Jake rebuked the instructor who was one in name only, and Lee Han scratched the back of his head, abashed. He really had forgotten. He dumped every bit of an instructor's work on the assistant instructor.
The semester evaluation. Was it already that time?
The famous evaluation of the Royal Academy. And why was it famous?
...How many will be left this time?
Because this was the season when sixty percent of the first-year students were expelled.