The Boy Who Punches Trees
Far from the reach of the Empire's dominion, there lay a small village.
So remote that neither the imperial knights nor the tangled political intrigues of the capital ever reached it. It was the home of people who had lived quietly for generations, tending to the great trees of the forest.
The unprecedented fear that had recently begun to hang over the village stemmed, quite simply, from a sound.
Thud.
A thunderous boom, repeating countless times a day.
At first they'd attributed it to mountain birds. The valley was walled in by sheer cliffs on every side, terrain that amplified even the faintest echo into something enormous.
But the sound only grew louder with each passing day, and the villagers came to believe that some colossal thing was drawing closer.
"There were moments when we wondered if perhaps it was all just our imagination running wild."
It was not.
A handful of brave villagers had banded together and made the trek toward the source of the noise. What they found there were trees shattered as though trampled by something, splintered into ruin.
"If that had been all, it might have been a mercy."
The village chief clasped his bloodless hands together and squeezed the words out through a parched throat.
"A few days ago, the monsters that had overrun these mountains vanished without a trace. Do you understand what that means?"
"I'd say it means the monsters abandoned their territory and fled."
"...Yes. Exactly."
A monster abandoning its habitat could mean only one thing. Somewhere in these mountains, something powerful enough to overwhelm every creature in the vicinity had claimed its ground.
"Someone I know who came back alive from the front lines recognized your face."
"...."
The chief hesitated, choosing his words, then carefully held out a worn leather pouch.
"This is everything the villagers could gather. It won't even amount to pocket change for someone like you, but... please, save our village from that monster."
A dull clink of metal sounded from within the pouch. Iris stared down at it for a long moment, then shook her head.
"I won't take this."
"B-but..."
"I'm telling you I'll accept the request without payment."
She paused, then added:
"Consider it payment for all these years of knowing who I am, and keeping your mouths shut anyway."
It was no figure of speech.
After the war had drawn to a close, her one and only wish had been a life where no eyes could find her. That was the very reason she had drifted out to this wilderness, beyond even the farthest reach of the Empire's surveillance.
And the villagers, despite knowing her true identity, had willingly kept her secret.
"...Please, be careful."
Leaving the trembling voice of the village chief behind her, she pulled her hood low and slipped out of the village.
Her name was Iris.
Once, she had stalked the battlefields of a great war. A retired soldier.
Once past the village and onto the mountain path, a heavy sound rolled out from somewhere far ahead.
Thud—!
The ground beneath her feet trembled faintly. No, this was no illusion. A second boom followed, as if to prove it.
Thud—!
The old trees lining the path shook their branches roughly, showering down leaves. Birds burst skyward all at once, scattered in every direction, and vanished.
Even so, Iris did not slow her pace.
By the time she reached the mountainside, she was looking at a scene of dozens of trees snapped like kindling. Judging by the marks left on the trunks, wind had nothing to do with it.
Rather...
...A person's fists.
The broken trees bore deep fist-shaped dents, their surfaces stained clearly with dried blood.
She examined the surrounding trees one by one.
Some had already rotted; others were still intact. This was not the aftermath of a single sweep of destruction. The oldest wounds had bark dried and warped around them.
At least three years' worth.
She crouched to study the fracture of a fallen trunk. The fist imprints were impressively deep, but the size of them was smaller than she'd expected.
She raised her hand and gently laid it over one of the marks.
...Small.
Far too small to belong to a grown man. An unsettling intuition flickered through her mind.
Her gaze drifted slowly across the forest.
Traces of the same action, repeated in the same spots, over and over, for years.
Which meant only one thing. Training.
Her eyes narrowed.
...A child has been training in this remote wilderness?
She was still reeling from the unbelievable hypothesis when—
KRAAAAAGH!
A monster's howl tore through the air. Iris was on her feet before her mind caught up, sprinting toward the sound.
How long did she run?
She arrived just in time to witness something staggering.
"...Grrrraaahk!"
A massive orc and a young child were locked in a test of strength, palm pressed against palm. Judging by his height, the boy had yet to even come of age.
Crack-crack-CRACK!
And that scrawny child was holding his ground against an orc — a creature that could crush a soldier's steel plate like paper.
For a while, Iris simply stood there, staring at the surreal scene with her mouth hanging open. By the time it occurred to her that she ought to rescue the boy, the situation changed.
"HUUUAAAH!"
With a spirited battle cry, the boy surged forward. What happened next was a sight Iris — with all her long years of experience — would remember for the rest of her life.
The boy climbed atop the fallen orc.
Both fists raised high toward the sky, he began to hammer the orc's face, quite literally, into pulp. Green blood spattered through the air, and the orc's pitiful screams echoed across the entire mountain.
"Hoo... hoo..."
By the time the orc's struggles had all but ceased, the boy slowly rose to his feet. His body was painted head to toe in blood, but a bright smile had spread across his face.
"You are...?"
Only then did the boy's eyes find Iris. Those eyes, still aglow with the joy of victory, drifted slowly toward her.
And then—
WHUMP!
Barely a single step later, his upper body pitched forward.
Iris blinked. The boy lay face-down in the dirt, utterly motionless.
...He fainted.
Iris looked down at the unconscious boy and let out a low hum.
No trace of Aura.
The strength to shatter towering trees bare-handed, with no Aura at all. To end an orc's life with nothing but fists. Even respectable knights wouldn't dream of attempting such a feat.
Is that even possible...?
And yet, who could deny what her own two eyes had seen?
The boy had accomplished the impossible by every law of common sense.
...This boy.
In the next instant, Iris's heart began to pound.
He possesses a once-in-an-era talent.
She had seen every flying, leaping prodigy the world had to offer, and even so, this talent inspired something close to awe. She herself was one of the finest geniuses on the continent, and that only sharpened the shock.
She could not recall a single soul, in all of history, who had achieved such a feat at this age.
...How far could this boy go?
She coveted him.
Desperately.
When Sian came to and opened his eyes, the first thing to greet him was an unfamiliar ceiling — or more precisely, something closer to the inside of a tent.
"You awake?"
He was still blinking groggily around the space, trying to get his bearings, when a voice came from right beside him.
He turned his head to find an unfamiliar woman sitting on a log outside the tent, tending a small campfire.
"Here. Eat."
She held out a piece of meat, browned to a deep gold. Sian just stared at her. It was natural to be wary of a total stranger — but his hunger got to vote first, and it won.
"Not going to eat?"
He snatched the meat at once. It was overcooked, tough and dry, but perfectly serviceable for filling an empty stomach.
...So who exactly is this woman?
Looking closer, she wasn't a complete stranger after all. She was the very woman who'd been caught at the edge of his vision right before he passed out.
Sian let his eyes wander over her attire.
The armor caught his attention first. The lion crest embossed on the breastplate was rather handsome, he supposed. He wondered if she was a knight, but she didn't look nearly strong enough for that.
"...Who are you?"
"Iris."
"That's not what I mean. I'm asking what you do."
Iris narrowed her eyes at the sky for a moment, then answered as though muttering to herself.
"Retired soldier, I suppose you could say."
"Retired soldier?"
"Well, the war is over."
She clearly had no intention of giving him a straight answer. Sian shot her a sidelong look and sighed.
"My turn to ask, then."
This time it was Iris who spoke.
"What were you doing out here?"
It wasn't a difficult question.
"Training."
At that answer, Iris's expression shifted in a way that looked distinctly pleased.
"Bit too intense to call it mere training, wouldn't you say?"
She tilted her chin toward a spot behind him, where the trees Sian had felled over the past days lay piled in heaps.
Sian scratched the back of his head sheepishly.
"I really, really want to get strong."
"...."
Instead of answering, Iris tore off a bite of meat and chewed. A short silence passed before she spoke again.
"Why?"
"Do you need a reason to want to be strong?"
"Everyone thinks that thought at least once."
"But," she went on, "the people who actually turn that wish into action are rare. And someone who can grind away at it steadily, life and limb on the line, in a barren place like this? Rarer still."
"...."
"To snap a tree with a child's strength takes thousands of punches. Tens of thousands, even. Building power like that demands effort that chews through blood and flesh."
The stream of compliments made Sian oddly embarrassed.
"Besides, the evidence of your effort is written all over this mountain."
She wasn't wrong.
Over the past stretch of days, Sian hadn't merely been hitting trees. He'd hung from cliff faces for hours at a time, climbed up and down the mountain more times than he could count, and traded blows to the death with the monsters that roamed these slopes.
"No one manages all that on the strength of wanting to be strong alone."
No, seriously — that IS the only reason.
Sian swallowed his protest.
"Which would mean you have some all-consuming purpose to match that madness of yours."
"No, really, it's..."
"But I won't pry."
Iris rose to her feet.
"Nothing good ever comes of digging up someone's past. And more to the point, it doesn't matter."
She broke into an easy smile and added:
"More importantly — do you have any idea how absurd your current training method is?"
"Huh? Is it?"
"Oh, absolutely. Punching ancient trees to pieces? People in the old days didn't even train like that."
"Uh... but I did actually get stronger."
"Which is exactly what makes it remarkable."
Huh.
He'd never given it much thought, having no one to compare himself to, but being praised like this — it felt pretty good.
"It was a miracle that could only happen because raw talent was backed by that kind of stubbornness and effort. Honestly, if you'd found a proper teacher and walked a normal path, I couldn't even guess how far you might have grown."
"...."
"Truly, letting talent like yours rot would count as a loss on the Empire's books, and no one would bat an eye."
Iris crossed her arms.
"If you want, I could take a look at you."
Sian looked her up and down, unhurried.
What caught his eye was the conspicuously flashy armor and an appropriately respectable-looking scabbard. If anything, it all seemed closer to display than function. Resting his chin on his hand, he considered the matter carefully, then spoke.
"...You?"
"Hmm?"
"No matter how I look at it, you don't seem all that strong."
Iris's jaw dropped open. Sian pressed on, almost jabbing at her.
"I appreciate the advice and all, but I'm pretty sure I'd win."
"...."
"Oh, and the meat was good, don't get me wrong. Looks like you've had a pretty sheltered upbringing, though — I mean, look at it, you burned the whole thing. Can't say you've done much camping, huh? Or maybe you've just spent your whole life inside the Imperial Palace."
Either way, there didn't seem to be a thing worth learning from her. As Sian stood his ground with arms crossed, brimming with confidence, Iris simply stared at him, dumbfounded.
"...Well. Fair enough."
Only after a long pause did she open her mouth again.
"I seem to have briefly forgotten that one good hit teaches more than a hundred words ever could."
She tossed her sword to him. Sian caught it and met her eyes for a beat.
"Then show me what you've got."
As it happened, Sian had been waiting for exactly those words.
He grinned and rose from his seat.
When he adjusted his grip, an unfamiliar chill ran up through the blade and startled him — but he let none of it show.
"Want to come at me first?"
"Pfft, go right ahead."
Sian lowered his stance and angled the blade up in a diagonal guard. Beyond the bluish steel, he could see Iris letting out an exasperated, almost groaning laugh.
"Go easy on m—"
CRASH!