Ghoul versus Ghoul? (1)
When the semester evaluations began, the trade that enjoyed an unexpected boom was none other than the quarries.
The last act, the flourish that crowned the semester exams, was this.
Match against the Rock Troll
The final act of the semester examinations.
Because of that match, the Academy bought fine marble and hard stone from the quarries in bulk. Only the nobles and merchant chiefs who managed the quarries prospered, however. For the laborers working beneath them there was no boom at all. If anything, this was the season when the overwork grew worse.
The facilities were threadbare, without so much as proper quarrying gear, and the only things that occupied the site were pickaxes, enormous hammers, and great iron spikes. Where the mountain had been carved away, a vast face of stone stood bare, and the quarrymen beat upon it without a moment's rest. Steel rang—kwaang, kwaaang!
"Strike in order! Don't let your stance slip!"
"You stupid bastard! Don't freeze up! You son of a—!"
"Stay sharp! Slip once and you'll snap your own neck!"
Bellows laced with curses flew in every direction. In a trade where a single mistake put your life on the line, that was simply how it had to be. Even so, they were only this high-strung because the rock had to come out whole. On an ordinary day they were not bad men. They needed the money, and their lives were precious, so they turned rough only while the work was on.
Then, in the middle of it, something cracked.
"You stupid bastard!"
One of the hands taken on as a new hire that very day had finally caused an accident. He had struck against the grain. A fissure opened through part of the stone mountain, and little by little it spread.
Crrrrk—!
"Uh—uhhh?!"
"Quit stammering like morons and get clear, you idiots!!"
The crew chief's roar was raw gravel. A single mistake could become a disaster, so of course there was a manual—and running, without a second thought, all the way to safety was the finest manual of all.
While everyone else broke into a desperate flight—
"W-wait...!"
One green worker's legs had locked. The unexpected must have drained the strength clean out of them.
"Gus...!"
A coworker cried his name and lunged to help, but the moment had already passed.
With a grinding roar, boulders split along the fissure came crashing down one after another. Before a calamity like a rockfall, a human being is helpless beyond measure. Faces went white. Everyone was certain that today one man would be reduced to a handful of bloody pulp—
A hand shot out, seized the worker by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him clear of the falling stone.
"...Huh?"
"Get a grip. How long are you planning to stand there frozen?"
"......"
"You're not cut out for this work at all. Find something else."
"...Th-thank you."
"Even the thanks came too late."
"...Yes, sir."
The worker gave a slow nod at the advice of the man who had saved him. As that man had said, the work really didn't seem to suit his nature.
"Mr. Rohan! Thank you, truly. If it weren't for you, we'd have been hauling off a corpse."
"A corpse? There wouldn't even have been a corpse left to haul."
"Would you quit saying things like that? It's bad luck."
"If you're grateful, throw in some extra pay."
The laborer Rohan answered curtly and bent himself back into the work as it quietly started up again.
A rockfall that large, and yet no one spared it a thought before the job began anew. In its way, the sight was a horror. The laborers took it as a matter of course. There had been an accident, yes, but it was only an unforeseen one. In a world without unions—without even the notion of a laborer's rights—who was going to worry over you just because something had gone wrong? Honestly, accidents like this were as common as the day. And would you believe there were men pleased by it, saying that thanks to the great heap of fallen rock the work looked likely to finish sooner?
"I know. I'll speak to the higher-ups and see you get more. We don't have to pay the bastard who caused the accident anyway, so I'll just shove all of it your way."
"Now that is a decent way to say thank you."
Steel bit—kang! krack!
"...Well now, that's some skill. You happen to have worked somewhere else?"
The crew chief had been watching the laborer Rohan, and when he caught the man's craft he could not stop marveling. The skill was that far from ordinary.
"Just experience, piled up here and there."
"Heh. A veteran, then—and a fine one at that!"
The real start of quarrying lay in dressing the rock so it could be loaded onto wagons and the like. Anything too heavy simply could not be moved. And the only tool given for dressing stone was a single pickaxe; there was scarcely anything else. So the work demanded nothing but a practiced hand's strength and technique, and in a quarry where one's life was always at risk, a capable veteran was precious labor.
This one's no ordinary fellow. Look at those even strikes.
Krack! Kraaack! Every time the pick passed, the rock came away dressed. It was not something brute strength alone could do. The craft needed knack and technique. Superb!
Even if I have to pay him more, I'm scouting this man!
Every trade suffered a shortage of talent. The crew chief's eyes lit.
...Miserable as hell. For some reason it's only the old men who like me this much.
The worker dressing the stone was Rohan. No—the knight who had taken another name for a while and become a quarryman could not hide the sour look on his face. When he checked the owner of the intense stare burning into his back, all he felt was gloom. Some bastard named Taechang drew stares that fierce from beautiful young noblewomen. What a man like him received was...
What a crock of shit. Goddamn it.
Nausea surged in him, but he kept silently at the quarrying, a thick mask over his mouth to block the stone dust, swinging the pick without pause.
"Huff—! Huff—!"
Breathing was a battle. The mask itself was a special make. An alchemist-merchant had claimed it stopped quarry dust and fine particulates with 99.9 percent certainty, and that in exchange the damned thing was hell to breathe through. Apparently the man had not been lying. So the harder he drove his body, the faster his stamina burned compared to usual.
Even so, he could not have been more satisfied with this godforsaken mask. Only at this intensity was it easy to feel his limit.
Kang! Kaaang!!
Hard as hell!
He was trying to break a stone far harder than the rest, and the shock sang all the way through his hands. To the crew chief it must have looked as if he split rock with ease. It was nothing of the sort. Pick work stole more stamina the longer you kept at it, and the harder the thing you broke, the more the impact traveled into the body. In that sense, a body already breaking stone at more than five times anyone else's pace was hitting its limit fast.
Pain climbed from wrists and forearms that were being abused—a signal that injury could come at any moment. On an ordinary day he would have thought little of a signal like that. Right now he was bone-tired, and his mind kept sliding into a haze. However good one's recovery, the thing called a limit still existed.
Eighteen hours of training a day really is torture.
For eight days already he had thrown himself into training at this same pace from dawn to dark. Two hours of running the moment he woke. Three hours climbing cliffs with a log on his back. Five hours honing his weapon arts. Meals snatched in the gaps between—seven and more—and catnaps. And every hour that remained, he had poured entirely into the quarry.
It amounted to the same as having no rest at all, and little by little both mind and stamina were showing the bottom. Trusting the regeneration his flesh had been born with could carry him for a day or two. Once that stretched past eight days, scraping the bottom was only natural.
"......"
Kaaang! Kang!!
But he did not stop. If anything he struck harder, stronger, and kept on breaking stone. His arms corded. He had thought he already knew the knack of cinching his strength, yet the more he tried it, the more a new sensation bristled through his whole body—the transfer and flow of force, then focus, then embodiment. The more he repeated and mastered the work, the deeper and thicker that embodiment became.
It was surely a method of training possible for him alone. Something only he could do: a special constitution, and years upon years of repeating this process.
And at a certain moment—!
I can see it.
My limit.
The worker Rohan—no, the knight Lee Han—focused. This moment, when he could see his own bottom, was the crossroads: a fork where he might grow, or might fall back.
A flare of instinct. It's here! He understood without thinking. The thing he had been waiting for—the thing a certain kind of warrior would count as luck to meet even once in a lifetime—had come.
The state of no-self.
Forced into being by driving body and mind to the limit—until even the self is forgotten.
Lee Han forgot even the existence that was himself, forgot even the act of his body moving, and simply swung the pick. Now not even Lee Han knew the result—what road this forcibly raised Self-Forgetting would lead him down. But Lee Han believed in himself. In the effort of driving himself to the limit all this time, solely to reach what he had aimed for. In the years.
Thoom. Kang. Krack. Motions repeating. No—forgetting even the motions, the focus gone from his eyes, the present given over to nothing but contemplating the body. Inside Lee Han, a small and utterly trivial change took place. A faint shift in the flow. No: a shift that had arisen, faintly.
And that—
Shhk!!
The finest result was achieved.
"...Ah."
A moment too late, the pupils that had lost their focus returned to normal, and Lee Han nearly lost the strength in his legs.
"Hey, Rohan. Ease up. Push too hard and there's a way you end up in the ground."
"...How long was I like that?"
"Hm? Not even a minute's gone by."
"A minute..."
"Y-you're not actually hurt, are you? W-want to head back even now?"
"......"
The crew chief fretted, terrified his precious ace might ruin his body. Lee Han, for his part, looked at what he had done.
...So it was worth attempting after all.
The rock he had brought down. It had been hard beyond words, and until now there had been nothing for it but to smash the thing apart. But now—
"Huh? Why's the cut face of this stone like this?"
"Rohan, how did you do this?"
"...Just, well."
The pick had not broken the rock. It had split it cleanly into several pieces, the way one splits firewood. Confirming that, Lee Han gave his answer with nothing but a shrug.
"It just sort of ended up that way."
The night of the twelfth day of the semester evaluations. A knight who had finished a bulk-up that was his alone, kept ready just in case.