The Elephant Prince
Even so, nothing changed.
The prince was a lion, and the bandit underlings were a herd of hornless deer.
Had they simply fled, they might have lasted longer—but no matter how many arrows they loosed, stones they hurled, or weapons they swung, they could not harm the prince.
In the end the underlings lay sprawled across the ground with something broken, tears of pain streaming down their faces, and the prince soon stood before their leader.
"Now only you remain."
"Why didn't you kill any of them?"
The giant still had not risen. He spoke while drinking his wine.
"Showing mercy, are you? Those bastards are animals. Do you have any idea how many men they've killed and women they've violated just to satisfy their urges?"
"Hmm. It isn't so much mercy as… I simply didn't feel the need to kill them. Honestly, I didn't particularly want to, either."
"That half-hearted attitude will put you in danger someday."
"All the better. If I'd wanted to keep myself safe, I never would have come here in the first place."
A glint of madness flashed through the prince's clouded eyes.
The bandit chief felt it too.
"I took you for some champion of justice. Turns out you're just a lunatic."
With that, he suddenly hurled the leg bone he'd been gnawing at the prince.
The prince snatched it out of the air and smashed it back into the chief's shoulder.
But the chief merely caught the bone that had struck him, as if nothing had happened, and rose to his feet.
"Hah!"
He had put real force into that swing—and the man had taken it bare-bodied without so much as flinching.
Far from being intimidated, the prince was delighted.
"A madman needs a good thrashing."
The chief kicked at the prince.
The movement was far too swift for that sluggish-looking bulk.
The prince threw himself backward, clearing the point of impact—yet the force was so tremendous he could not fully bleed it off. He tumbled across the ground several times before rising, and it felt as though a rib had cracked.
"Haha!"
Even better.
A moderate pain cleared the mind.
The prince felt his senses sharpening beyond what they had been before.
"A dangerous one, even among madmen."
Looking at the prince standing there with his eyes open and smiling, the chief felt an inexplicable unease.
Leave him alone and something bad would happen—he was sure of it.
The man standing near the cave entrance still nagged at him, but somehow he sensed that underestimating this lunatic here and now would cost him dearly.
For that reason, the chief decided to go all out from the start.
Hissss—
Both of the chief's hands flushed a deep red, as if they were chunks of iron pulled from a forge. Smoke actually rose from them.
"Whoa… that's impressive."
The prince marveled with genuine wonder.
He had heard that warriors who commanded Prana beyond their rank could breathe fire and stretch their limbs at will. Seeing it in person was something else entirely.
"I suppose bare hands won't cut it."
The prince picked up the sword he had tossed nearby.
After that, neither of them spoke another word. They simply set about trying to kill each other.
Every time the chief's searing hands grazed the prince's body, skin tore and burned. Whenever those hands struck a wall or the ground, sparks flew and enormous handprints were scorched into the stone.
The flames spreading through the cave were bad enough, but every swing of the chief's hands heated the very air around them, and sweat poured endlessly from the prince's body.
Sizzle—
The sensation of his skin cooking was no mere trick of the mind.
Sustained exposure to that blistering heat drained his stamina. His skin stung so fiercely his brow furrowed of its own accord.
And still the smile never left the prince's lips.
The chief was in no better shape. His entire body was a bloody mess, carved open by the prince's blade. These were not mere surface cuts—several of the wounds were dangerous.
As time wore on, the prince grew ever more precise in dodging the chief's attacks, pressing him with mounting ferocity.
The final blow—severing the tendon in the chief's right leg—was especially devastating.
Thud.
The chief dropped to one knee.
He could no longer move. Twisting his waist from a fixed stance and flailing his arms was little better than thrashing about.
The prince wasted no time. He lunged in to take the chief's head.
He thinks he's won.
But the chief still had a hidden dagger up his sleeve.
In that instant he opened his mouth toward the prince—and a pillar of fire erupted from within, swallowing him whole.
Humm—
Then came a sound like ringing steel.
More precisely, it was the blade of the sword in the prince's hand that sang out.
Amazingly, the prince's sword cleaved through the pillar of fire, carving open a space within it.
"I thought you might try that."
"Heh… so you read me completely?"
Those were the last words the chief ever spoke.
The prince's sword took his head clean off.
"Kahah!"
The moment he felt the breath of a formidable enemy cut short—and knew that he himself still lived—the prince burst out laughing.
The remaining bandits recoiled in terror at the prince's bizarre demeanor, while his uncle watched him with complicated eyes.
"E-Elephant!"
Someone among the bandits cried out.
The flames and heat had burned away the clothes Sunya had been wearing, leaving what lay beneath completely exposed.
"Huh…"
Even his uncle, who had been so grave a moment before, could not close his mouth at the sight of his nephew's member.
It was truly enormous.
For a split second, he wondered whether it belonged to a human being at all.
Some time later, his uncle summoned the prince to the training grounds.
"I've been thinking carefully about what happened last time."
"Yes?"
"I considered speaking to your father about it, but from experience I judged that would not be a practical solution."
"Uh… what exactly are you talking about?"
"The bandit purge from the other day."
His uncle let out a sigh.
"There have always been types like you. The kind who find exhilaration in life-or-death combat."
"…"
"Personally, I consider it far preferable to those who lose themselves in women or gambling—assuming one is a warrior, of course. As a retainer, I suppose I ought to stop you."
"Haha…"
The prince looked awkward. But he had already known as much. That was precisely why he had been sneaking out at night to raid bandit camps.
"And yet, on the other hand, it also struck me as a waste."
Then his uncle's tone shifted.
"A waste…?"
"You have talent. Talent for the martial path. I became certain of it when I saw you instinctively use the Sword Cry—something I had never properly taught you."
"Uh…"
So that was the Sword Cry.
He had managed it somehow, but the prince still felt dazed by the whole thing.
"I found myself curious how far you might climb as a martial artist. So—forgive me, brother-in-law—this time I intend to teach you in earnest."
The prince brightened at his uncle's words.
He had not expected the prospect of still having more to learn to feel so joyful.
"Let us begin with the fundamentals. How much do you know of Four-Image Martial Arts?"
"Not much. Only that it means imbuing martial techniques with philosophy, or something of the sort…"
Honestly, even saying it aloud, he did not fully understand. Wasn't martial arts simply a matter of dodging well, blocking well, and striking well? What philosophy was there to imbue?
And yet those who could perform Four-Image Martial Arts displayed transcendent movement and ability that went far beyond mere physical enhancement through Prana—just as the bandit chief from before had heated his hands to scorching and breathed fire from his mouth.
Because of that, the prince had more or less regarded Four-Image Martial Arts as a kind of sorcery.
For his nephew's sake, his uncle explained patiently.
"The origins of Four-Image Martial Arts begin with the Astra."
"The Astra… aren't those the miracles the Brahmans—the priestly caste—used to perform long ago?"
"To be precise, the Astra were fragments of divine authority that the gods lent to humanity in the distant past, before they left the earth, in order to gather faith."
"The gods…?"
He had only ever heard of them. He had never seen one.
By the prince's era, the gods had all but vanished without a trace. Then again—considering that the Naga, which he had thought were merely legendary monsters, had turned out to be real—perhaps the gods had truly existed as well.
"That is precisely why the Brahmans of old were held in higher regard than even we Kshatriya. It was the Brahmans who received the Astra directly. Wielding and administering the power of mighty gods, mere human warriors and kings had no choice but to bow their heads before them."
"I already knew that much."
"At times like these, you simply listen, Elephant Prince."
"…"
"At any rate, for reasons of their own the gods departed the mortal realm, and the power of the Astra faded along with them. But humanity could not let go of the power they had once wielded—and so they created Four-Image Martial Arts, an imitation of the gods' Astra."
"…So Four-Image Martial Arts is the act of imitating the gods through martial technique."
"Exactly. You catch on quickly, as always."
It was said that martial arts themselves had originally begun by imitating the movements of beasts. Whether that was true or not, the prince had never imagined that applying the same principle to the gods would be the origin of Four-Image Martial Arts.