The Knight Defies the Season (2)
…Derek still could not understand.
What had the knight seen, that he believed him? And even if he had believed, how could he fight like that—with his whole heart, his whole strength?
It would have been easier to run. Anyone dropped into a moment like this, anyone set before a giant like that, would shake with fear and run. That was the natural order of things. Yet the man had not given up. He had taken the most dangerous place on the line and was swinging his sword there. What drove him to such desperation? What made him brave?
“Hm? You don’t know an answer that easy? Honestly, you’re quite the clever fool yourself.”
The reply came from a girl whose amethyst eyes suited her far too well.
“He isn’t fighting because he’s brave. When a person has something to protect, and the moment comes when they can’t run, they split in two. They give up and end their life, or they thrash. The one you mean is probably the latter. Only he isn’t the sort who thrashes in any ordinary way—”
“—He resists with everything he has.”
Derek turned the words of the wisest, most trustworthy girl he knew over in his mind and watched the battle between man and monster. A wretched battle. A desperate one.
“My lady… I think the one thrashing is only me. That man is simply brave. That has to be it.”
He muttered it under his breath, and with the words his strength gave out and he fell. Even as he went down he kept his eyes wide and prayed.
Please. Let it be some small help. Even a little.
“…System Window?”
In that instant Lee Han felt it: the presence of countless petals pouring out of the sky. And he felt something else behind him—the resolve of a gray-haired boy who had poured out his longing and, for the first time, dragged up a desperate courage. He took hold of that feeling, clear as a bell.
“Haaaa—!!!”
A Lion’s Roar tore out of him with the shout, and he swung harder, more savagely than before. For a breath the Ghost King faltered under that thunder and that blow, and stepped back. Lee Han had made a giant retreat on spirit alone, on the force in a swing. An ant making a man give ground. He had not done it for the sake of the feat. A coward he had thought nothing but timid had shown courage for the first time, and Lee Han was only setting his own spoon beside it, so that courage might be repaid.
Then the sky came down.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud—!
Countless needles, shaped like petals, poured onto the earth. Papapapat! Hidden weapons in the form of flowers packed the air and burst, and great needles fell like rain. Ten thousand of them, roughly. Perhaps more. They did not seek people. Even if they had, a gentleness clung to them that would not harm a human body. They hunted only the monsters that carried a wicked demonic nature.
The secret art of the Sacheong Tang Clan, poison-and-hidden-weapon house and hegemon of Sichuan in the wandering world of rivers and lakes. Petals become needles. The sky becomes a killing rain.
“Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand….”
It was a spectacle grand enough to drag that old ultimate art up out of memory whether he willed it or not. And sure enough, the power was no less a spectacle.
“Ugh… ugh!!”
“Ga…?!”
“!!?!”
“Aaaa…!”
The needles, falling like a squall, sought only magic beasts, and they killed them in pain. They found the gnolls locked with the students, of course. They also found the Ghost King—crushing the skull, piercing the neck, flaying heart and back. A claymore bursting open in the sky. Better than a claymore, in one respect.
“You little bastard. You’ve been sitting on one hell of a cheat skill.”
Wooong. The moment the needles touched him, Lee Han felt his body ease. Only a little, but stamina returned, and the wounds with it. A buff, if he had to guess. Death for the enemy. A buff for one’s own. Where else did a cheat skill like that exist?
Of course. Not without a drawback. He felt the presence of the collapsed Taechang kid. The boy must have spent everything the instant he opened Falling Flowers of Ten Thousand. One use, and finished. A viciously poor return. It’s enough. The part he had been given was enough: time to draw one breath, and a brief margin of ease. In a melee with no air in it, help like the first rain on a long drought. He could not have asked for more.
What pleased him even better—
“━━”
“Hurts, doesn’t it? So what are we going to do about that?”
“??”
“Looks like there’s one more shot left.”
Shaaaaa! He had barely finished speaking when the lake rose. The water climbed as if an imugi—a great serpent on the verge of becoming a dragon—had finished its cultivation and meant to ascend. If even he were caught in that current, he doubted he could bear it. The water was that threatening. That absolute.
“Don’t you bully our instructor!”
Irene Windler. The highest tier of this generation, a talent whose true price would run higher even than Roen’s. A girl with the gift to become the archmage of the century opened her magic.
“Waters, rage. Waters, spin. Current, pierce my enemy. Become bars, and pass judgment.”
“Blow, wind. Become one with the water. Become a guillotine that pierces the foe.”
⟨ Dual Incantation ⟩
A water spell, vast mana poured into it without stint. And the ghost girl who circled at Irene Windler’s side bound to that already terrible magic an outsized wind spell of her own. Wheeeeeing! A dual incantation. Possible because the girl held two attributes, and because a certain ghost kept watch at her back. A miraculous instant in which one person used two attributes at once.
“Th-that’s impossible.”
Odewal screamed it, and he was not wrong. To any other mage’s eye it was talent past comprehension, and Mystery. And that spell, like a disaster—
“Go!”
—went for the monster that had tormented someone precious to her. What took shape was a small waterspout. Small or not, a waterspout was a waterspout, and the moment it swallowed the Ghost King—
Kwaaang!!
The Ghost King went silent.
“…The chick from next door. Look at her now. Not a chick at all. A phoenix hatchling.”
Admiration leaked into the mutter, as if he had never expected so much help from a spell-slinger. The old contempt slipped out on its own, but for this moment at least he was honestly grateful. The girl was trying so hard. Because of her, he had bought a little more time. And he meant to spend this time, precious as a thousand pieces of gold.
The kids are giving everything they’ve got. I can’t go out looking shabby.
He decided to take out the hidden move he had prepared.
The small waterspout bound the Ghost King tight. Water compressed by mana—that mass, that flow—was not a thing any living creature could defy. In truth the Ghost King could not so much as twitch. It was no different from being shut in a narrow cage of bars and put to the water.
“-----.”
The spinning bars did not merely hold him. Their rotational force cut, and seemed ready to grind the whole body away. A blender. The thing was a blender made of water. Once caught, there was no getting out, not until the body had been milled down to nothing. Death was the only exit, and it was an overwhelming power one person should not have been able to raise alone.
The problem was this.
“Arin, hold on just a little longer!”
“Uuuugh!”
However great the spell, keeping it up was brutally hard. Irene was already shaking from head to foot, a breath from fainting. If she had not been forced through stamina training after meeting Lee Han, she would not have lasted a moment. She would have dropped where she stood.
“See? Stamina really is national power!”
Is that something you say right now?! Irene felt half mad already. No—how had the instructor been fighting this monster at all? He’s insane. This thing is an actual monster! Its resistance was nothing ordinary. Resistance aside, the monster was trying to walk against the waterspout.
Kwaaaaa!
Thud! Thooom!
So what if the body was ground apart? Pulverized or not, it had only to regenerate, and if the water was heavy, it had only to break through by strength. That was the sort of thing it was. A creature that solved most of the world’s impossible problems not with its head, but with a body so absurdly powerful it was unfair. One step. Another. Like something out of a horror film, it was climbing free of the waterspout to come down on her, determined to pay back every bit of what it had suffered.
“I-I’m gonna diiiiie!”
“Arin—?!”
Irene hit her limit. Her eyes rolled white. She could not—
Tok.
“You worked hard.”
“…Instructor?”
“Thank you. I’ll pay this debt later.”
“…….”
Irene forgot how tired she was and looked at him. Encouragement and thanks, in the same breath, and relief came with them. The relief of knowing she was allowed to faint.
“You… you have to buy me an expensive meal later….”
“Promise.”
“A r-really expensive one….”
Hehe. A loose little laugh spilled out of her, and she fell, looking straight into those confident eyes.
Thud.
Not quite light as a feather, and yet he barely felt her weight. Lee Han caught her and lowered her slowly. A reasonably gentlemanly posture, if nothing else. His two bright eyes, though, never left the Ghost King.
Grrrrk! A sound like a nail on a chalkboard, and through the weakening waterspout the thing came on. Strength that made plain why men treated it as a living cataclysm.
“I’ll admit it. You’re strong.”
Lee Han had scraped together every means he could think of to reach this day. A Piercing-One Spear packed with explosives. A great harpoon. Help he had not planned on, from a skill and from a mage. He had used all of it, and the thing was still not dead. He admitted that. It was strong, and it was not a monster a frail man like him was meant to beat.
He might not kill it. Subduing it was possible. An absurd thing to declare, and yet he had never been in the habit of empty talk.
Tu. Tuk. His body turned, slow. A slack, flowing motion. A languid face, and no strength left in the body at all. A sword form of released force, nothing like the spirit-filled figure he had shown until now. For now, this is enough. His eyes, though, were clearer than at any other moment, and his focus stood on end.
The day before, in the quarry, he had swung a pickaxe without rest, and the thing he had understood was one thing only. That strength did not appear only when you put strength into it. A paradox. Nonsense, to hear it said. But the force he had come to know was not necessarily the force a body owned. Strength is everywhere. A turning current has it. A blowing wind has it. A song has it, and the sound of an instrument. So did a pickaxe.
The swings of that hour had been the frailest of his life. And still the pick had split rock like a blade with a cold, keen edge. Not smashed it. Split it. A feat he could manage only because he spent, all at once, the strength the pick itself possessed—the strength iron possessed. Nothing so grand as a divine sword’s single union. He had simply begun to understand. The weapon in his hand was, in truth, a sharper and more powerful weapon than he had thought.
And that understanding—
Hwararak!
—formed Sword Ki. Sword-Qi That Wounds. The new horizon of Fighting Art that Roen had shown. But Roen’s Sword Ki had been coercive, a thing forced up by piling element on element atop inborn talent. Lee Han’s was not. The sword had only released the potential dwelling in a lump of iron. The principle resembled Gyeong, but he understood the sword more deeply now, and the sword answered its master’s will. Sword Ki wavered like a shaft of light, and at last—
The iron spends itself. The sword answers. Out of season, a flower opens wide.
Hwak! A flower bloomed in full.
“???”
In the eyes of the Ghost King, barely clear of the waterspout, the illusion came again. What was this?
“…A flower?”
Yes. A flower. Nothing to do with the flower-shaped needles of a moment ago. A flower in the true sense. Not a flower fit to open in this season, though. It resembled the petals of a fruit tree that riots into bloom on a spring day and vanishes. A flowering that defied the season, as if the sorcerer had worked sorcery again. And the petals that opened were like—
“—Couldn’t manage the Six Harmonies Sword Art. Turns out I can make plum blossoms bloom, though. Funny thing.”
Yes. The flower resembled the plum blossoms of spring.
“…….”
The Ghost King did not even think of dodging the Sword Ki that looked like petals. Blooming so beautifully, it had a bewitchment that stole the gaze even of a king of monsters. Beautiful. It was only a flower the Sword Ki had opened, and still those who looked on it felt nothing but strangeness, and mystery. None of the things that had challenged him a thousand years ago had shown him anything like it. So he was caught by plum blossoms opening against a season already leaning toward summer, and just like that—
Puk.
“?”
He had to watch, dazed, as a petal pierced his flesh and went in.
“It won’t be a weak one.”
Lee Han muttered it with a gaunt face, as if this time he had truly used everything.
Pasaseuk…. The sword that had bloomed the Sword Ki finished its life, crumbled to powder, and scattered. Whatever the art, a price was required, and the sword had paid its part for its master. By blooming the flower he, too, had not even the strength left to crook a finger. That was the kind of technique it was. Even so, he looked satisfied.
“A pretty decent piece of work, isn’t it?”
Puk! Pupuk! Puuuk—!
He admired what he had bloomed: petals driving into the Ghost King’s body.
“!!!!!”
The Ghost King’s body flipped. With a boom that seemed to come from a distance he rolled across the ground and screamed. No attack until now had dragged so violent a reaction out of him. Now he had no choice. The petals of Sword Ki had worked into the grain of the flesh, fine as threads, and dug into every corner of him—roaming the organs, stabbing, cutting, burrowing, again and again. For any living thing that could feel pain, enduring that was a distant hope. By now he was probably looking at hell.
“…Told you. I’d subdue you.”
As expected, this would not kill him. That regeneration was past cheating. It was no different from a Mystery. But a thing that could regenerate could also hurt. Lee Han had learned what it was to have blades roaming endlessly through one’s insides, back when he was young and a mage had tortured him. After something like that, the strength ran out, and standing did not even occur to you.
…Unfortunately.
“You… you… sor…cery.”
Kuuung…!
Common sense did not seem to apply to him. The Ghost King rose after all, and Lee Han smiled a bitter smile. Immortal, they said. Was the stamina infinite too? I take a hit and I’m on the floor. Monster bastard…. He was sick of it. Stubborn enough to put a cockroach to shame.
“……I lose, you son of a bitch.”
He admitted the defeat without fuss. Before it was a magic beast, it was a living thing the present him could not beat. A transcendent creature. A monster. A natural disaster. A Demon King. Every one of those names fit, and that was why an ancient kingdom had fallen.
Kuuung. Kuuuung!
“I’ll… kill you!!”
It came to eat him on a surge of violent feeling. Lee Han, unable to twitch a finger, leaned against a tree and watched with a blank face. At least it did not lay a hand on Irene, or on Derek, or on the fish in the lake. It wanted only him. Well.
“…You want to eat me that badly?”
“Grrr!!!”
Blood-bright eyes, as if to ask what there was to discuss. Lee Han let out a short laugh. Popular with strange things, as always. He shrugged.
“Eating someone like me won’t even fill your belly. Isn’t that right?”
“Kill… you….”
“Keeps saying nothing but ‘I’ll kill you.’ Must’ve heard it often enough to learn the words. What do you think, old man?”
“……?”
The wrongness struck in a fleeting instant. Who was this speck speaking to? And as the question formed—
“—Another grotesque technique. But it was quite good. Once it’s finished, even I won’t find you easy to handle. Heheh.”
……Since when had he been there?
“Aren’t you a bit late?”
“I am sorry. But I could hardly leave the castle standing empty.”
“For crying out loud. A man’s about to die over here.”
“I had faith in you.”
“Bullshit. You sure talk a fine talk.”
“Heheh! I spoke from the heart, and still you won’t believe me. How wronged I am.”
The two of them conversed at their ease, and somewhere in the middle of it the Ghost King had become an afterthought.
“GAA!!”
He roared in rage. How dare they ignore him? The rage did not matter.
“My, but this one is dull. Your life is already over. Why cling so hard—?”
He tried to advance. He had no legs.
Shunk—!
No. They had been cut off. Severed legs. And it was not only the legs.
Shhk. Shhk—!
“G……r…!”
The neck was coming off with them. Still unable to understand what had been done to him, the Ghost King stared wide-eyed. Not because grievance kept him from closing them. He simply had not yet perceived that he had been cut.
The Ghost King—!
“-----.”
There was not even time for a death cry. The life in his gaze only went out. So emptily.
“…Why does everyone call me the monster.”
The old man in front of him was the monster. Lee Han was sick to death of a skill so fast he had not even seen when the sword moved. The Ghost King was coming apart in pieces, and all he could do was shake his head. Beating this human was not merely far off. It felt like a thing for some far later day.
Baltar Grace. The kingdom’s strongest knight, and a Superhuman. The Ghost King’s only misstep had been to appear in an age that possessed Aura Users—an age the ancient kingdom of a thousand years ago had never known.
Futile. And overwhelming. The end of a monster raid.