No Excuses in My Life (2)
When had that been, again?
"You never get tired of those damned martial arts novels?"
The question had come on night duty, from a superior he'd known for nearly ten years. Didn't it ever grow stale, reading wuxia through every single watch?
"Nearly ten years of it. A man ought to be sick of them by now, shouldn't he?"
"Sometimes I am. But every time I open one, there's something new."
"Honestly. Why do you like that stuff so much?"
"Hmm... Because they're full of romance?"
"Romance can freeze and die."
"And you, sir. You've been at that Duel or whatever it is for more than ten years yourself. You don't get tired of it?"
"Bah! Duel plucks the heartstrings of a man. It's the foundation. The foundation!"
"Ah. Yes, sir..."
Birds of a feather, as they say. Looking back, he and that sergeant had both been oddballs. Even so, he had judged himself the better of the two, and not without reason. He would take his pleasure in anything—webcomics, romances, whatever came to hand—while that gentleman wore himself out playing nothing but first-generation cards. By the man's own account, he recognized the original, and perhaps the second generation. Nothing past that.
In any case, the sergeant had been right. He really did favor martial arts tales over every other genre.
If he had to give a reason—
"Because it's exhilarating."
Exhilarating. People said you envied what you didn't have, and he had been unreasonably fond of those absurdly bold knight-errants. No fretting for them. They simply went straight ahead and did what they wanted. They lived in the present rather than worrying over tomorrow, and instead of fearing death they agonized over the thought of living even a single day half-heartedly, spending every minute and every second at full strength. Let life end whenever it ended, so long as there were no regrets. How exhilarating that was. How dazzling.
...He had never managed it.
Always cowed. Always short on confidence. A life of being shoved one way and knocked the other. What was that, if not a life as spineless as a reed in the wind?
And so he had envied the knight-errants in those novels—men who lived for xia, that uncompromising way—more than he envied tycoons or men of power. Their lives held no petty excuses.
"So you like the protagonists. Is that it?"
"No. I just envy everyone in those stories who chases the way of the xia."
Yes. It wasn't the protagonists he liked. He longed for a knight-errant's life, and that longing had become an ideal painted deep in his heart. So he muttered it often.
"If there's such a thing as a next life, I won't make any cowardly excuses. I'll just live however my heart leads."
"Then why not start now?"
"So it's all right if I set the top of the battalion commander's head on fire?"
"...Uh. The man's already bald. Why bother?"
"Heh. Fair enough."
If a next life came, he would not live as he was living then. That was all he had meant.
Well.
"Hmm. Assaulting a superior officer isn't exactly exhilarating, is it?"
Though he rather thought that at the very end of that life, he had managed something like the ideal he wanted.
He—no. Lee Han, who had somewhere along the way grown to the same age as that past self—kept his eyes on the road ahead and turned it over as he advanced. Was he truly living as his heart led, the way the man he had been once swore he would?
"...Who cares."
A moment later he brushed the question aside. Useless fretting. The worrying itself was unbecoming of a knight-errant. There was only one thing worth remembering.
I will do what I judge to be right, and that act needs no one else's appraisal.
In the end there was no correct answer. Who but a god could know what ripples an act like this would spread? It was self-satisfaction, nothing more, and the responsibility would be his alone.
His foot came down.
Lee Han stopped at last. Not because he meant, in his heart, to stop going forward. A perimeter wall like a castle rampart had risen in front of him, and the main entrance was an iron gate that looked sturdier than the wall, so he paused to consider. Two choices. Climb the wall, or shout. He liked neither. He had come to provoke a great noble. If he was going to do it, he ought to do it with more flash.
So he did.
Footsteps, steady and unhurried.
"Hm?"
"What the—?"
"Halt where you stand and identify yourself. This is the estate of House Tristan."
The soldiers guarding the iron gate poured out a razor-edged presence with the warning. A great house, as expected. Even the rank and file were elite, their spirit out of the ordinary, and the will to attack him at any moment came through clear as speech.
He didn't stop anyway.
"I—I told you to halt!"
Lee Han went straight at them, like a truck whose brakes had failed. His pace quickened, and then he was running.
"F-fire! Intruder!!"
A bell clanged through the night to announce the intruder, and the soldiers drew their bows. No hesitation in the shots. Superb. Had they been under his command, he would gladly have granted them reward leave. Unfortunately he had nothing to give them now, and as things stood he was simply—
Twang! Twaang!
"Th-the bows!?"
"Wh-what is that!!"
—an attacker who meant to punch straight through them.
Every arrow that should have buried itself in his body bounced away. Not off armor. The fierce pressure of a man sprinting at full strength knocked them aside. He ran as if he meant to tear the wind, and then—
He left the ground.
"—!"
He hung in the air like a high jumper, crossed five meters in a breath, and drove his fist at the iron gate barring his way. Not the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist. Not anything of the sort. Only a straight punch with all his strength behind it.
And that fist unleashed enough force to blow a door of solid iron clean away.
The crash rolled out over the grounds.
"..."
"...Am I dreaming?"
The soldiers forgot even to keep shooting. They simply stood there, mouths hanging open.
No. Why would a punch break that?
"...Haaah. Hinges must be a little rusty. You ought to keep up with the maintenance."
"..."
"What?"
"Heh..."
Lee Han offered the advice while shamelessly rolling his wrist, and the soldier let out a hollow laugh. A frontal breakthrough. The third option Lee Han had chosen was, in every sense that mattered, a crucible of shock.
The mansion of the Tristan marquisate was vast. Not merely large—vast enough to drop a man's jaw. The house itself was enormous, five separate farmsteads ringed it, and there was even a broad park for keeping horses. The household staff numbered well over two thousand. Call it a mansion if you liked; it might as well have been a village raised on the spot.
More shocking still, set against the immense influence and wealth of House Tristan, all of this was a drop in the bucket. Well, of course. Tristan worked a fine precious-metals mine and ran no fewer than five trading companies. For them, maintaining an estate of this scale would hardly count as extravagance.
Wealth and influence on that order meant the Tristan mansion was spoken of in the same breath as a fortress. A fortress wearing a mansion's face. Dozens of elite soldiers stood ready at all times, patrolling the whole of the grounds in shifts. Archers lined the high walls, prepared to loose at any moment. Every entrance was sealed by an iron gate commissioned directly from the dwarves, a mystery-race. Even if you cut down the soldiers, common sense said there was no way past the main gate.
...And now that common sense had collapsed.
The gate in the iron wall had been torn out whole. An impossible sight. What, exactly, were they looking at? Soldiers mustered by degrees, lighting the dark with torches, and word of the situation passed among them.
"Wh-what is this?!"
"Did a greater monster break in?!"
"Watch for ballistae! There may be a ballista nearby!"
Perfectly within the bounds of common sense, they thought, and they prepared to answer it. A ballista, or a great monster, had struck without warning and ripped the gate away. If not that, the gate could not have been torn free. Commonsense, all of it, and not one of them imagined that a single man had done this.
But soon enough they learned who the culprit of the impossible act was.
"...No. This isn't it."
"...What?"
An mutter that made no sense. The intruder who let it out seemed displeased with something. Was he regretting, even now, that he had attacked the marquisate? If so, he was welcome to it. Extenuating circumstances, even at this hour...
"If you're going to pick a fight, you ought to do it properly."
"..."
Apparently not.
The soldier looked at his eyes as the words left him. The light in them was remarkably clear.
He flinched. Goosebumps rose all at once, and with them the certainty that he ought to run, right now.
Sure enough.
A grinding crack split the air.
"Get out of the way, if you don't want to die."
"..."
The soldiers saw it. The monstrous strength of a man lifting that enormous iron gate in one hand. One of them remembered that hanging the gate, only the day before, had taken more than ten men, and the color drained from his face. More of them began to suspect, again, that this was a dream. Unfortunately, it was not.
"Huuuuuh!"
Breath in, breath out. Drawing the air deep, the man—Lee Han—began, slowly, to turn his body with the iron gate still in his grip.
A rush of wind.
Lifting a gate that huge ought, by rights, to have pulled a shoulder or an arm from its socket. For this moment, Lee Han decided to set aside what a human body was supposed to allow. He forced himself into the posture of a man about to throw a shot put, and he spun, and he made a wreck of everything around him.
"Aaaagh!"
"R-run!!!"
"Ghk—!"
Two thousand five hundred and fifty kilograms. A lump of iron boasting roughly two and a half tons, merely by turning, was threat and ruin in itself. Even in a slow rotation the turbulence threw off a monstrous gale and a crushing pressure, and laid everything to waste. The soldiers forgot the duty they were there to perform and could only flee. Lee Han, hoisting a mass of iron that huge and playing with it, was terror enough—and there was no one anywhere who wanted to end as a slab of meat sheared apart in the gate's spin.
The grounds were panic. Before long, not a soul remained within thirty meters of him.
A creak of strain. Thanks to that, Lee Han had all the run-up he needed. He set his teeth and made ready. From his arms, from his shoulders and waist and legs, came the sound of things rupturing—crack, then a long grinding tear. Had this been before he took the elixir, the pressure would have pulverized him with room to spare.
"Ghhhhk!!"
He endured it. A grip and a strength far beyond what he had possessed, together with a deeper grasp of Gyeong, granted him the monstrous power to hurl a mass of that weight. The chance, however, came only once. He would not be doing this a second time. A mad stunt, and only a single throw of it. Once was enough. When the strength had gathered, and the measure of distance and the timing had all lined up—
"Aaaargh!!"
With a cry that could not be told from a battle shout or from pure stubbornness, he let the shot fly. No—the iron gate.
It drew a slow, rotating arc.
He had thrown it, yes, but spinning a mass like that was more than flesh should bear. What mattered was the fact that he had thrown it. Two and a half tons of iron flew, and struck. That already meant a calamity sufficient to bring down a building, and the ground beneath it, had arrived.
The earth shuddered. The thing Lee Han had thrown—a shot put that went by the name of an iron gate—struck dead-on the mansion where the marquis resided, and the ground shook under the blow.
"...Right. This is what picking a fight actually looks like."
What use was it if a man pettily smashed a single front gate and called that a provocation? Blood was pouring from his eyes, his mouth, his nose—the very picture of the seven orifices venting blood—but Lee Han only brushed the dust from the bridge of his nose, satisfied. The result was handsome enough that those minor injuries never quite managed to bother him.