Episode 18 – Man-Eater versus Man-Eater? (5)
The Diancang Sect.
It turned up in martial arts novels the way a stock player turns up, one corner of the Nine Sects and One Gang, and for the most part its arts ran to the swift sword. It was a name that had stayed with Lee Han as well, in its own way — Lee Han, who had once stood night duty and read those novels day and night without rest.
Why had it stayed?
"Shoot the sun. Pierce it clean through.... Ha. Fiction or not, there's style in it."
The Sun-Shooting Sword, which meant to shoot the sun and strike it. The Sun-Felling Blade, which swore it would drag the sun down. Even the Piercing-One Spear, which vowed it would run the sun through. The names of the arts, if nothing else, lodged easily in the memory.
Lodged, and that was all. The more he actually read of the Diancang Sect, the more often he came away disappointed.
"All you do is swing fast. How is that supposed to bring down the sun?"
He had thought it while he watched swordsmen who did nothing but swing quickly, lost in swift-sword tricks and straining themselves sick for no purpose but to cut people down. If they were going to be like that, wouldn't it be better to change the name of the art from Sun-Shooting to Man-Shooting?
"If they mean to keep that identity of theirs, they could at least pretend to hurl a spear at the sky. Nothing but a grandiose name, as usual."
Easy to say. How was a human body supposed to reach the sun? Even a missile, that club of destruction, never got farther than the stratosphere. So he had figured the art, for all its name, only ever cut men. At the time Lee Han had mocked himself for it, blaming the drowsiness for a strange flight of fancy.
But now.
'Never thought I'd be the one to put it into practice.'
The moment a thing you had only imagined was carried out, it stopped being imagination. In this very instant Lee Han meant to reproduce the piercing of the sun, and by a method so crude that crude was all it knew how to be.
"Grrraaaagh!"
"Put a little more into it, slave."
"I— I am not a slave, I tell you!"
"If you hate being called that, then do it properly."
"Aaaaagh!!"
The mage screamed as if the cry were being ripped out of him.
Odwal Bernard, professor of the magic faculty, lifted a tree into the air.
A mass of six hundred kilograms, risen into the sky. An absurd, unreal sight, and a fine lesson in why a mage, even alone, was called a terror of the battlefield.
However strong the telekinesis, there was always a limit. Mana was not infinite, and merely lifting a weight like that and holding it upright demanded every scrap of his mind.
Lee Han did not care how hard the man was suffering. He asked anyway.
"You've killed as much of the air resistance as you can, haven't you?"
"Th-the formula is inscribed! I even laid three whole enchantments on it, I tell you!"
"That's all?"
"—?!"
"Short. You're short."
"You—! How am I supposed to lay five enchantments or more when you gave me a mere ten days!"
Lee Han's demands had been many. Reinforce the object's durability. Cut the air resistance. Increase its penetrating force. Add fire magic besides, and more along with it. It was no different from ordering the man to knock together a war-ending weapon on the spot.
Bring any mage in the kingdom, and an order like that would have made him balk. From the start, there was a fixed number of enchantments an object could bear. So to lay three of them in only ten days, Odwal's skill was plainly extraordinary, and his suffering past all telling. As proof of that suffering, liver spots were on the verge of blooming across a face that had already looked terribly old. It was a ruin no one could believe belonged to a man in his twenties.
Even so.
"Well. If this is the best you've got, nothing to be done. Useless slave."
What a spell-slinger suffered was none of his concern.
"—?!"
"Quiet, you bastard. Break my focus and you die first."
"Nngh...!"
He ignored the useless spell-slinger's thrashing with ease and poured his concentration toward a single target.
'Work with what I've got.'
Lee Han did not play the fool of clinging to what he could not have. He only strove to draw the finest effect from the preparations already in front of him.
What had been made ready was a shot. He bent his whole mind upon the ballista, and upon the ballista alone — the one he had packed with the great store of powder pried out of the princess.
In truth, the kingdom had no launcher that could strike a projectile this enormous and fling it high into the sky, so no one knew whether the attempt would succeed. But Lee Han believed. He believed in his own sturdy body.
From this moment on, he had to become the striker that would hit that huge projectile.
Even he, confident in every other thing, would not normally dare to kick something this heavy. Smash it, yes. But how was he supposed to throw a thing that fragile without breaking it? Now, though, it was possible. Coated in telekinesis, it was not wholly impossible.
'Push it!'
Not a blow to break. A striking art that only drives the object away.
It was usually done with the palm. Lee Han used his foot — leg power, more than five times the muscular strength and destructive force of his arms — and with the transfer of his whole body's weight he tested the limit of Gyeong.
A crack came up, the sort that made it seem the leg might burst. He ignored it. Force condensed at the toes, centrifugal force, and a bodily sense and instinct no ordinary human could ever possess all gathered into the kick, and a strength fit to shove that enormous projectile erupted from him.
Of course, he had to accept the cost. His right leg burst apart.
Even so, there could be no launching a projectile like that without a sacrifice. One leg was soaked in blood, and yet through the instant of pain Lee Han wore a smile. Not because he was some pervert who enjoyed suffering. He had felt a result too satisfying for anything more, and the laugh simply came.
"Flying true."
The ballista went like a javelin made to be thrown. The log-spear, worked over with magic, reached the thunderclouds still whole, and at the last it ran dead through the center of the giant's wrist. His spear did.
"Boom."
As if it had matched its timing to Lee Han's playful taunt, the spear exploded where it stood.
The spear that carried the whole of his strength had drunk that power down to the last, and by itself that was enough to make a massive bomb. On top of it, the vast quantity of powder inside the burst spear caught fire, and flame began to burn the giant's hand.
A spearhead in Lee Han's own reading. Where the sun should have been, it pierced a monster.
"Wh-what is that..."
"...Good heavens."
The people who had watched the whole sequence from the ground lost every word they had.
In the legends there were giants and devils. Of the Knight King, the Lion King, and the others said to have annihilated them, there were tales that they had cleft giant and devil in half at a single stroke. But legend was only legend, and no one believed the stories were real.
And yet now...
'Was that legend true?'
Giant Slaying.
People could only stare, blank, as if the legend were not a fiction at all but a tradition raised on something that had truly happened. And they looked. At a certain knight, showing them the legend of Giant Slaying with his own body. At him, standing firm in the center of the Academy Colosseum.
The knight...
"Hey. Bear-Girl."
"Y-yes?!"
"Help get these people out of here, right now. The assistant's probably clearing everyone already, but he won't be enough on his own. Drag in every kid from the sword faculty if you have to, and get them all out. You hear me?"
"Y-yes?"
"Tch. Figures. This much doesn't even come close."
"...?"
The bitterness on him was plain, and Levi Fault blinked, wondering what on earth he meant.
"Look."
"...Ah."
He didn't explain. Better to see it, his finger said, jabbed at the sky, and Levi Fault understood why he had ordered the evacuation.
Hard as it was to believe, the giant's arm was stubbornly knitting itself back together even while it burned.
And it was still being summoned.
...Horribly so.
"Evacuate! Evacuate! Quit gaping and evacuate, you commoner bastards!!"
Damian Paulet was a man soaked through with the supremacy of nobles. His ideas were harsh and his mouth harsher, and yet the slave-assistant was working himself raw to save even a single life. Sweat poured off him as he drove the people out, and along the way, when he found a pregnant woman or an elder who could not keep their feet, he slung them onto his back or into his arms and carried them outside himself. His body screamed. He clenched his teeth. Leave things as they stood, and there was no telling how many victims would follow.
And while he worked, he thought it.
'It really happened, just like that man said!'
The instructor's words, which he had taken for the raving of a madman, had been the truth. Damian Paulet remembered ten days ago — the moment the man had suddenly hauled in both him and Odwal, professor of the magic faculty, and given the order.
"On the last day of the evaluation, a monster is going to appear from somewhere. So the two of you will prepare to help me with everything you've got."
"...Have you taken some medicine, sir?"
"Madman."
Honestly, at the time, both Damian and Odwal had thought it insane nonsense. It was hardly the first time the man talked nonsense, so they assumed he was only doing it to torment them. And so Damian had said it, as if to tease him.
"If that's how it is, why not just tell the Dean? Or the Royal Castle? Tell them a monster is going to appear."
"Already reported it. They told me to quit yelping like a mutt and get lost."
"...So you already did."
He had thought the instructor a madder bastard than expected. Already filed the report, had he. So this was how a mad thing had to be done, if you wanted people to call it truly mad.
But.
"I asked an acquaintance to send an Aura User. As luck would have it, every Aura User was away from his post. Baltar Grace has to guard the king, so he can't leave the Royal Castle."
"......"
Aura User. From the moment that superhuman name was spoken, he could no longer insist that this was madness. The instructor was serious to the bone, and in all sincerity he was certain a monster would appear at the end of the evaluation, his eyes bright with it.
"So we have to stop it."
"W-we do?"
"Why would I...?"
Damian and Odwal asked. There were plenty of other people. Why, of all of them, us? To that question the instructor said:
"Your lives are mine anyway, aren't they? Then I can use them however I like."
...Words that made one doubt his character. No — words that truly treated the pair of them like penal slaves. The two of them nearly sickened with rage.
"N-no! Even so, why us — no, why are you the one stepping forward, Instructor?! Since when were you a man drunk on heroism?!"
Damian's fury burst, and he shouted with a fresh bracing for the beating to come. The instructor he knew was not a man that heroic. He was simply a man whose decency had split clean open. So why walk a path this self-sacrificing? It didn't even suit him!
Damian squeezed his eyes shut, ready for the blow. But what came, unexpectedly, was not anger. Only an irritated grumble.
"The kids have to be saved, don't they."
"...Pardon?"
"The bastards upstairs say they can't believe me, because there's no proof. And nobody is giving any help. It might not stop at our kids. The little ones who come to watch our kids that day might all end up at a funeral...."
"......"
"Yeah. Like you said, this is only a possibility. Maybe I'm just crazy. Maybe I'm worrying over nothing. But listen. What if I'm not? If a monster really shows up that day, who's going to take the blame, and who's going to help those kids?"
"......"
"Right. Nobody. There is nobody, damn it...! Nobody wants to help if it means they lose something. So what do you want me to do? I have to move."
"...Wh-why?"
A great deal was held in Damian's question. Why, when no one believed him, when it might be nothing but delusions of grandeur, did he not run, and choose instead to fight? Damian wanted the reason, and the instructor answered without an inch of hesitation.
"Because I don't want to look at people's lives as numbers, the way those justification-spouting bastards upstairs do. That's why!"
"......"
...Damian was overwhelmed.
It was not brilliant speech. There was no sound logic in it, no proper justification. Nothing but words so artlessly sincere they were almost stupid. And yet why was it that his chest boiled at that twisted argument?
And Damian...
"......What do you need me to do?"
He asked it back, and the instructor, for the first time—
"Damian Paulet. The thing you have to do is one thing. Save as many people as you can. The spell-slinger and I will do the fighting."
"Wh-why would I..."
"Shut your mouth, you spell-slave bastard!"
"......"
He had called Damian's name.
"Please, I'm telling you, just run!!"
But once the real thing actually broke over them, his lips had gone stiff enough to freeze.
Even so.
'Damn it. All he did was say my name!'
Damian himself did not know why he was moving this hard. Only that something the instructor had forced into him — something other than chivalry, alien in its way, and at the same time a conviction that this was the right way to go — was moving him through the fear of death.
And this conviction Damian felt, different from chivalry, could not help but be a strange notion to the people of this world. Something Lee Han had driven into him by force. Not leaning on anyone. Not chasing a reason, or a justification. Only doing as the heart commanded, and so there was no profit in it at all. And yet his heart pounded harder than at any other time, and he could cry out that his life stood unashamed...!
Seeing that—
"Ah, come on! Run like your feet are on fire!"