Dawn [4]
A moment ago the sun had still been high overhead. By the time we had cut through the forest, it was gone, and night had come down.
"Seol-ah."
I gave the arm that held her a little shake and called her name.
"...Haaahm. What is it?"
Lee Seol-ah, only just woken, rubbed at her eyes and answered slowly.
A minute ago she was complaining it was uncomfortable. Now she's living the good life.
Her eyelids kept trying to sink shut. Maybe I should have just let her sleep. She wasn't at a growing age—I'd only mistaken her for one because of how she looked. All the same, I turned a guilty look on her and spoke.
"Looks like we'll have to camp tonight. You all right with that?"
Making a twenty-six-year-old who looked sixteen sleep rough in the woods—guilt crept up on me, slow and unwelcome.
Lee Seol-ah, it seemed, was a little different.
"Oh...! I've always wanted to try camping. This'll be fun!"
She beamed as if nothing could have pleased her more. From the look on her face, she wasn't forcing a smile just because I looked sorry. Her tastes really were something else.
"Then let's find food first."
"Huh? I thought we were going to go hungry."
"If it were just me, I'd skip the meal and run through the night. But you're here too. At your age, you need to eat well."
"Wow... you really do sound like an old man."
Lee Seol-ah said it almost in admiration. Good grief. When had I passed fifty? Honestly, I didn't feel any different from when I was fifteen. Time really did fly.
"That too."
"..."
I had nothing to say. It reminded me of something I'd heard long ago, helping an old man gather scrap paper. People had called me an old soul since I was young, and now I'd actually been demoted to a real old man.
"Hah. Fine. At least I haven't wrecked my body."
"That's true."
"Could you not agree with me?"
"Pfft—sorry. So, how are we going to get food?"
Listening to her stifled giggles, I drew my sword. Shring—the silver blade caught the moonlight and shed a keen edge.
"Eek."
"Relax. I'm not going to stab you."
"Wha—how did you know? I was going to tease you about drawing your sword the second you got mad."
"You're predictable. That's all."
I said it with a satisfied smile. This round was mine.
"Wow... fifty-one years old, pfft! Look at him, so pleased he beat a twenty-six-year-old with words. Khk...! Just look."
She could barely hold her own laughter; mischief threaded through every word.
"...You'll be there soon enough."
"—!"
The conversation had wandered off again. Talking with Lee Seol-ah always felt like the road suddenly veering up a mountain.
"Anyway. We're eating pork."
"? Pork?"
"Yeah. Right over there."
The words were barely out of my mouth before I was cutting through the trees.
"? Where are we going?"
Already used to the speed, Lee Seol-ah asked as her long white hair streamed out behind her.
"Mm... to catch a pig?"
We crossed some fifty zhang—about five hundred feet—and I came to a stop in front of a wild boar.
Squeeeeal—!!
And just like that, the boar's life ended, its throat opened on my sword with sword qi gathered along the edge.
"...How did you find it?"
Lee Seol-ah's mouth hung open, her eyes sparkling.
She reacts like a kid. It's cute. I'd been exactly like that until I was three. I answered with a quiet chuckle.
"It just showed up on my qi sense, so I came."
"?? Your qi sense reaches fifty zhang?"
"Yeah. Isn't that normal?"
"Qi sense is just the sense of feeling qi. It isn't meant to survey a range that wide..."
So that was how it worked? No wonder the bandits never noticed me until I was right on top of them. They hadn't simply been lazy.
While I was thinking that, Lee Seol-ah suddenly seized my cheek and pulled.
"? Mmph—what are you doing?"
"You really are human...?"
She kneaded my cheek this way and that, looking thoroughly baffled. Then what—was I supposed to not be human?
"Oh, but it's really soft."
And with that, she went right back to poking at it.
Is this a generation gap...? Or was the culture simply different, being another world? I couldn't begin to follow her.
"Hey."
The moment her hand retreated, I grabbed her cheek in turn.
"Uuu..."
I pressed, and her lips jutted out. She looked like a goldfish.
"Pfft...!"
I couldn't hold it in.
"Your face is actually hilarious."
"...Who looks at someone's face and calls it hilarious."
Lee Seol-ah stuck her lips out and grumbled.
"And who was it that started squishing someone else's face out of nowhere?"
"Good question. Who was that...?"
She played innocent for a moment, then failed to hold it and laughed under her breath.
"But if we're keeping score, aren't you the biggest problem? Scooping up a grown woman out of nowhere."
"Mm... now that you mention it."
I nodded, and she giggled.
"Your way of thinking is surprisingly normal."
"Of course it is. More normal than someone who snores away in another man's arms."
"...Ugh. When you put it like that, it sounds weird."
Not that I was wrong. This was Lee Seol-ah, who had shouted herself hoarse with excitement and then slept like the dead for two straight hours. She slept so soundly I doubted she'd notice if someone carried her off—and in fact, she hadn't noticed when I did.
"Shall we call it a draw and move on?"
Having heard me out, she cleared her throat—ahem—and held out her right hand.
"Sure."
Amused, I kept her braced in my left arm and took her right hand in my free one, giving it a shake.
"Want me to put you down now?"
"Yes. Hearing that made me a little uncomfortable."
I set her gently on the ground.
"Haaa... Being carried like that, my whole body's gone stiff..."
She couldn't even stand properly. Her back stayed bent, and she wobbled where she stood.
"You should've gotten a little exercise."
I worked my hands over her back, her waist, her shoulders, massaging as I spoke.
"Nnngh... my bones, my bones... I want to, but it's the Nine Yin Severed Meridians, I told you..."
A little later she finally straightened her bent back and stood upright.
"Ahhh... you're really good at that."
Lee Seol-ah pounded her back with her fists.
"Well, I was a physician in my second life."
"Well, that's why I let you suddenly put your hands all over me."
The phrasing was a little off... but that wasn't what mattered right now.
"Anyway. Shall I get a fire going?"
"Ooh, you're lighting it for me?"
"Of course. I can hardly tell you to do it."
I smiled and drew my sword.
Shhk!
I slashed the blade down through empty air, and a spark bloomed.
"S-Samadhi True Fire...?!"
"What's that? I just rubbed the sword against qi."
"...? Isn't that harder?"
"How should I know? I can't do whatever Samadhi-something is, so isn't this the easier one?"
Lee Seol-ah stared at me as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"...Are you a monster?"
"Thanks for the compliment."
Chuckling, I cut down a whole tree, split it into firewood, and set the wood to the spark.
"You're awfully good at this."
"Of course I am. I've been doing this for fifteen years."
"?"
A question lingered in her deep blue eyes.
"What are you looking at me like that for? Demonic beasts turn up in the forests and mountains all the time, so I lived out there, sleeping rough."
Something odd came into her eyes as she listened. Pat, pat. She pressed her lips shut and patted my back.
"...Choosing to sleep outside isn't exactly something that needs comforting, is it?"
"It's all right, it's all right. Everything's going to be all right."
She comforted me while fighting the corners of her mouth, which kept trying to climb. Anyone could see she was teasing.
The sheer nerve of it got to me, so I tickled the nape of her neck and under her chin.
"Eek...?! Kyah—ahaha! Eek, hiyak...! Haa—ah...!"
Lee Seol-ah folded this way and that, laughing in the strangest sounds. She was incredibly ticklish.
"Huu, huu... Y-you startled me!"
She was so indignant she clenched her fists and trembled all over.
"I'll have to use that whenever you get cheeky."
"Grr...!"
Fuming, she tried tickling my neck.
"Go on. Try harder. I'm not ticklish."
"...That's cheating."
She stuck her lip out, grumbled, and sat down on the stump of the tree I'd felled.
I chuckled at the sight and began weaving branches and leaves together. Within a quarter of an hour, there was a space large enough for two.
"...So now it's architecture?"
At some point she had come up behind me. A hollow little laugh escaped her.
"This isn't architecture."
"Same difference."
The way she'd gone faintly prickly was too funny. I even drew on my internal energy to keep the corners of my mouth from twitching, washed a few branches in the stream, and butchered the boar.
"Here."
I skewered the meat on the rinsed branches and held them out. The corner of her mouth twitched, ever so slightly.
"H-hmph. Since you're ordering me to roast it, I'll specially roast it for you."
"Quit the weird acting and just go eat it roasted. I can tell you want to try."
"...Hehe."
Lee Seol-ah—at the age when a person might chew straight through stone (she was not)—surrendered to the meat in the end and ran, grinning, toward the campfire.
"Heh."
Watching her go, I let out a quiet laugh.