I Am Knight Lee Han
"Ah. It's already this late."
He had compared the knightly orders to the major leagues for a reason. When there was no ballgame—no battle—the players, the knights, sat idle. War, rebellion, or aid sent to an allied kingdom might have been another matter, but short of that they simply did not work. If they had anything like a duty, it was to raise their skill so they could answer whatever emergency came. Clocking in, for them, was nothing but a show: a performance of loyalty to the king.
Which meant, in short—
"I'm off."
"Already?"
"Got things to do."
"...Ah. Off to the construction site."
"Yeah, well. Unlike nobles drowning in money and spare time, a broke commoner has to work two jobs, doesn't he?"
"Haha..."
If the orders differed from the major leagues in only one respect, it was the pay, which ran only a little higher than an ordinary soldier's. Anyone with real strength who actually wanted money would have made more as a mercenary. Knights were the breed that joined to purchase honor and authority in place of coin. Even the salary was nothing but a stipend for keeping up appearances, and from a commoner's seat it fell hopelessly short.
And yet.
"You're not even going to that site for the money."
"You're imagining things."
Lee Han turned and walked away, a lazy flap of the hand standing in for a goodbye.
"...A man who could make as much money as he pleased."
Jake muttered the thought he hadn't quite dared say to his face, and shrugged.
That was when—
"—Where is Senior Rihan going?"
"Hm?"
Jord, the new knight Lee Han had just broken, came up offering a bow.
"Sir Parman. Forgive me for speaking first."
"Mm."
Spend long enough with only Lee Han and casual speech became a habit; courtesy like this was a rare thing, especially in the Third Order, thick with men from obscure houses.
"...Mind just talking like a person? All that etiquette makes my skin crawl."
"But..."
"It's fine. And don't call me sir. Call me senior, the way that Lee Han brat does. I'd rather hear it."
"Ah. Yes, Senior Jake."
"Hah. Much easier on the ears."
"..."
"Haha. Comes of sticking too close to Lee Han."
Jake Parman offered an excuse that was not quite an excuse, and Jord laughed, awkward, and played along. Even so his eyes kept drifting toward the way Lee Han had gone, and his hands looked itchy.
Seeing it, a glint came into Jake's eye.
"Ho. The urge to beat him isn't dead at all."
"...Even if I can't surpass him now, I don't think it's wrong to resolve that I will someday. I-I'm not asking for another spar like the one just now. I was already beaten that helplessly. I only wanted to talk it over a little."
"...So there are cases like this."
Rare. A young noble showing anything like fondness for Lee Han. Had today's bout really left that deep an impression?
Not bad.
He had always thought it a shame that the man he privately called a friend had nothing but enemies. A junior who wanted to follow him was something to welcome, and Jake did not stint on kindness toward one trying to get closer to Lee Han.
"Lee Han went off to his side work. In his own words, a second job."
"A-a side job, you say? ...Does he have no sponsor?"
Jord tilted his head as if he had just heard something grotesque.
Commoner or not, Lee Han was a knight—and not just any knight. He belonged to the Silver Lion Knight Order, the kingdom's strongest, sworn directly to the royal house. A man of that standing was a prime investment for merchants, and someone they would be eager to bind themselves to. Jord himself came from an obscure house with no fortune worth the name, and even he held a sponsorship contract with some merchant. Signing did not mean the knight lent his sword. It was closer to a formality, permission to go about trading on the name, though merchants, apparently, counted even that as important.
In any case, people lining up to sponsor members of the Silver Lions were past counting. For such a knight to claim he had no money and run off to a side job...
A grotesque case.
"Right. That's how it normally goes."
Jake did not hesitate to nod, as if Jord's reaction made perfect sense. He was a good senior, the sort who answered a junior's curiosity.
"That one refuses sponsors on purpose. Even with merchants lining up to sign him."
"Th-there's such a thing?"
"With him, there is. What was it he said? 'Take a sponsorship and it'll sit wrong when I retire later.' Something like that."
"...?"
"Haha. Don't try to understand it. That's the normal reaction."
In the honorable Silver Lion Knight Order, a dishonorable discharge might happen. A man who simply retired did not. And here was someone hoping to retire, and so refusing to take a single thing.
At any rate.
Diligent, or just strange. Honestly.
They had known each other a fair while now, and Jake still could not make sense of him.
Lee Han took up an axe.
CRACK!
The blade split the wind clean and came down true on the wood, and a fissure was already running through the log. Even skilled hands could only split a piece like that after hammering in several wedges, each bigger than a spike. Lee Han brought it apart with a single felling axe.
"Well, I'll be. That's Brother Rihan."
"Clean as you please."
"Still a skill worth coveting. How about it? Forget the soldiering and just come over to our side?"
While he worked for this logging outfit, Lee Han had rechristened himself—if one could call it that—as Rihan, and had his real trade down as soldier rather than knight. He knew well enough that admitting he was a knight would only tangle the job, so he had worked a little trick of his own. Trick or not, he worked with genuine diligence, enough that even among the woodcutters he was treated as the ace.
"I'm not quitting my real job. And stop flapping your mouths and do some work. What's with all the talk."
"You little— On a job like this, if you don't talk, the work hurts worse."
"That's right. You're still young. You don't know."
"Have a drink with us!"
"...I'm good."
One thing was the same on every rough job site he had ever seen: plenty of men worked on the strength of drink. He did wonder what they meant to do if someone got hurt, but Lee Han did not play the stickler. If they got injured, that was their problem, not his. He simply kept his head down and did the work, and for it he had to hear that a young man was living a joyless life.
There was one thing he wanted to deny.
What's joyless about it?
He was only splitting wood as a side job, and yet he was finding a considerable charm in the work.
The muscle pulls tight. That's the stuff.
Obvious, perhaps, once he thought about it. Of all the jobs in the world, why had he deliberately taken up woodcutting? He had gone looking for work that paid and made good training besides, and this was what he had found. In that sense, logging was a truly fine occupation.
THWACK!
Every time he struck, the shock began in his back and ran through the muscles of his whole body. Lats and erectors, of course, but the fine muscles as well, and the arms, the fingers—there was not a muscle that went unused. Study the tremor, study how force took an impact and let it run off, and the hours became so absorbing, so genuinely fun, that he lost track of when they passed.
And this is a technique, too.
An axe was not a tool you used well by stupidly pouring strength into it. It demanded a high order of skill. The way a man who had never driven a nail learned, in that first attempt, that nails were no simple thing, he learned that axe-work was no simple thing either: it wanted a posture that was delicate and clean, and technique, and the know-how that only experience gave. So now and then an idea surfaced. What if a sword could be used the way an axe was used?
Is this what they call wisdom picked up from ordinary life?
Taking trees apart gave him good training, and it left him with a feeling hard to name, as if he were becoming one of those masters he used to watch on television in his past life.
The me from before and the me now are nothing alike.
In that life he had never been this passionate about anything, nor had he taken any great joy in moving his body.
So this is how thoroughly a life can remake a person.
The Lee Han of before had lost his parents early and grown up under his grandfather. An orphan among his peers, he was bullied often and always cowed, and he grew into a timid, well-behaved child. Then, in his high-school years, his grandfather left him too, and to live on alone he turned at once toward the military.
He took the path of a noncommissioned officer, and the reason he became a soldier was nothing grand. A man with no money and no ability had only so many things he could do. Among the work that asked for nothing but persistence and effort, soldiering had looked the most plausible, and so he became a soldier. Of course, once he was in it and had seen every filthy thing there was to see, he regretted it in less than a year. What else was there? If he wanted to eat, he had to shut his mouth and take it. Then, in the middle of leave, he was caught up in an incident and died. He suspected that even without the incident, overwork and stress would have killed him anyway.
Looked at that way, this life had started foul and now felt, in its own fashion, worthwhile. He was still attached to a knightly order, but he did his duty, and he lived without watching other people's faces. Perhaps a life that had ended doing nothing but that had left him bitter; perhaps he had grown a little crooked because of it.
Still. A soldier in the last life, a soldier in this one. What a bizarre life.
He was comparing past and present that way, a hollow laugh just about to escape him, when—
He sniffed.
"Hm?"
Through a place rank with the smell of sweat came a fine, expensive cologne that had no business being there. Unfortunately, Lee Han remembered who that scent belonged to.
"...He's here again."
A nuisance of a friend he wanted to see no more than he wanted to see that captain uncle had, it seemed, come looking for him.