Chapter 265
Chapter 265
The Iron Emperor — Chapter 265
Not long after Dupyo called Jeylia's name, the door burst open and a little girl who looked about three or four years old came running out and clung to Dupyo.
'Don't tell me that little squirt is...'
Ryu-hwa, who had briefly decided Dupyo shared Giyul's tastes, was forced to abandon that thought. A woman in a modest skirt had just stepped through the doorway.
With the girl perched on his shoulder, Dupyo grinned and scratched the back of his head with one hand.
'Looks like that's the woman.'
Ryu-hwa watched with surprise in his eyes. She was shrouded in darkness, so the details were unclear, but she stood only about chest-high to Dupyo and had a slender figure. She was the exact opposite of the plump build Ryu-hwa had privately expected.
'Anyway, that little runt has weird taste, too.'
The girl on Dupyo's shoulder, fiddling with his hair, was playing happily without a hint of crying.
"Jenny, stop teasing him and come down. Don't bother Sir Jin-cheon."
Jeylia spoke in a soft, delicate voice that was unmistakably beautiful.
'.......'
Ryu-hwa, who had fallen silent, dug at his ear for a moment.
"Sir Jin-cheon, you've come again today."
"Ahem, yes. I was merely passing by and stopped in because I missed Jenny. Ha ha ha!"
Dupyo answered in a dignified voice utterly unlike his usual tone, though it was unquestionably him.
The problem was....
'Why is the Yeolje's name...'
No matter how much he rubbed his eyes and dug at his ears, it was unmistakably Samdopyo. That left only one answer.
'That bastard used a fake name?'
He suddenly remembered teasing the man — who could never attract women — that it was because of his name. Then he let out a deep sigh.
'Still better than Buru or Uru, I guess.'
Given Dupyo's talent for naming, borrowing names from people around him was probably the limit of his ability.
That he had chosen the name of Go Jin-cheon, a man of considerable fame, likely meant Dupyo possessed at least a modest scrap of discernment.
After a moment of off-track analysis, Ryu-hwa slowly resumed his observation. Dupyo, who had been chatting, was drawn by the woman's touch toward the wooden platform. While he played there with the little girl called Jenny, a swarm of girls poured out from somewhere.
Nearly all were Jenny's age. At the oldest, they looked about seven.
'That's a lot of them.'
Including Jenny, there were five girls in all. Jenny detached herself from Dupyo and clung to Jeylia.
"Mommy!"
"What is it, my Jenny?"
The practiced ease with which she lifted the child. A single thought flickered through Ryu-hwa's mind.
'That Dupyo bastard — he and I share the same tastes.'
Snickering to himself, Ryu-hwa raised his head again to peer into the house — and in that instant he froze, as if an electric current had shot through him.
She was sitting before the doorway with the child in her arms.
She was looking at Jenny's beaming face with a soft, tender smile.
Thunder crashed inside Ryu-hwa's head.
'Beautiful.'
Her features, framed by light brown hair, were small and delicate, yet her eyes held a faint blue tinge. She was a mixed-blood, a child of Northerners and continentals.
'Why...'
Ryu-hwa forgot even the reason he had followed Dupyo here, and fell wholly into her clear eyes and smile. In this moment he envied nothing except Dupyo, standing there beside her.
* * *
It was an uncanny sight.
Perhaps that word best suited the state this man was in right now.
"Haah."
Buyeo Gi-yul remembered Mong Ryu-hwa's mischievous laughter the day before while trailing Samdopyo.
"Haaaah."
"......."
He was unmistakably the same person, but Ryu-hwa's expression was so impossible to define that Giyul couldn't bring himself to say a single word.
"Hoo hoo."
First a blank face, then a dreamy face, and now a silly grin. It wasn't a bright laugh, either. From one angle it looked almost like a self-deprecating chuckle; from another, like a smile born of wistful memories.
"Heh heh heh."
Giyul asked in a trembling voice.
"......Who are you?"
"I wonder...."
Giyul seriously considered the possibility that this man, who was somehow contaminating the very air in all directions, might not be his fellow trainee Ryu-hwa at all.
"What kind of state is this supposed to be?"
Giyul shook his head side to side.
A moment ago, when he'd spotted him sitting like this, Giyul had rushed over in one stride, curious about Dupyo's woman. But what greeted him was not a vivid description seasoned with Ryu-hwa's clever wit. It was an empty shell, as if the man had left his soul somewhere else.
"Hul-hul, let's train hard again today! And you, my friend — you look especially fine today!"
"Haah. Hoo hoo hoot. Sniff."
"......."
Giyul looked back and forth between Samdopyo and Ryu-hwa once each, and then made his decision. He resolved to erase the very existence of his fellow trainees from his memory....
The two men's eccentricities even influenced the behavior of the soldiers undergoing training.
In Dupyo's case, once it became clear that his blissful smile was genuine, the soldiers began throwing jokes at him and mingling comfortably.
In Ryu-hwa's case, by contrast, the feeling that he was rejecting all approach emanated from him so strongly that — paradoxically — his encounters with widows, which had been sparse until then, exploded at an extreme rate.
The reason those women chose him: Ryu-hwa's appearance triggered their maternal instincts.
Their transformation became a topic on many people's lips, until even Eulji Buru heard the rumors and came to check their condition himself.
But the sight of Dupyo laughing as though delighted even when struck on the back of the head, and the way Ryu-hwa collapsed feebly at the slightest touch — those responses made even Buru wash his hands of them.
And so a week passed.
Samdopyo, who had spent the morning dashing through the mountains and fields gathering a bouquet, was walking along with arms full of flowers, humming to himself.
His expression was even more aggressively bright than usual. You could tell simply from his humming.
"Mm-hmm-hmm~!"
Every now and then he stopped to dance in bizarre movements.
He was on his way to Jeylia's house, having received an invitation to share a meal.
"Hul-hul, today I'll confess for sure!"
Dupyo roared, thrusting both fists toward the sky.
Dupyo was now marching boldly to stake his claim on the love that had come to him at the age of thirty-nine. As if on cue, an autumn wind blew, and falling leaves scattered and drifted down around his upraised arms.
"Kwak Jincheon."
"Wha— who's there!"
At the gloom-laden voice, Dupyo flinched and dropped his arms, spinning to look in every direction. Kwak Jincheon was the alias he had used ever since meeting Jeylia. Only Jeylia and the children knew that name.
Crunch.
He heard leaves being trampled behind him. Dupyo reflexively turned, his anxious eyes searching for the voice's owner.
A spear tip, reflecting the sunlight with a chill so sharp it looked frozen, appeared from behind a great old tree. And the person who stepped out after it....
"...Heh, how are you—?"
It was Mong Ryu-hwa.
At his appearance, Dupyo glanced around with a flustered face. Fortunately, the place where he had climbed to pick the flowers was a place rarely visited by others.
"Why did you change your name?"
Ryu-hwa asked in a low, quiet voice.
Dupyo recovered his calm.
"Hul, jeez, you startled me. But how did you know?"
Feigning nonchalance, he asked in a voice tinged with suspicion how Ryu-hwa had learned his alias.
"Jenny. You saved that child's life, didn't you?"
"So that's how..."
Dupyo had met Jeylia when he rescued Jenny, who was playing on a hillside and had been chased by a wild boar.
Having saved the girl, Dupyo took one look at Jeylia, who came running up belatedly, and fell at once. When she asked her benefactor's name, the flustered Dupyo had blurted out "Kwak Jincheon" before he knew what he was saying.
Thanks to the brutally intensified training regimen he had been running, his notoriety among the soldiers was immense, and the tales — there was at least one soldier in every two or three houses — had been so exaggerated in the telling that among the children he had earned the honor of being used as the final obstacle standing between them and becoming a righteous hero, ranked just below dragons.
Under such circumstances, how could he lightly reveal his real name before the woman he had fallen for at a single glance?
That was how he had become Kwak Jincheon.
Dupyo remained unable to answer, but Ryu-hwa gave a bitter smile. His eyes said that he already knew everything.
"Jeylia."
Dupyo twitched.
A shudder ran through Dupyo's body as if he'd been struck by lightning.
"Is it because of her?"
"Well, I mean—. But why are you..."
"Catch."
Dupyo stammered the question out, as though he couldn't adjust to the way Ryu-hwa was acting. Instead of an answer, Ryu-hwa threw him the black iron staff — Dupyo's own weapon — which had been standing off to one side.
"...Heh, what is this?"
Dupyo caught his weapon and asked Ryu-hwa in a low voice. He could feel that something was deeply, deeply wrong.
At Dupyo's question, Ryu-hwa watched the clouds drifting by and slowly parted his lips.
"No woman has ever been able to fill my heart."
"Hmm."
"Do you know this emptiness?"
Ryu-hwa slowly lowered his head toward Dupyo.
"Don't tell me...."
"That's right. That's what always got me."
"Jeylia is my woman!"
Dupyo's roar burst out. Ryu-hwa gave a dry laugh and countered.
"If she were your woman, I wouldn't be doing this. But all you've done is stay at her side, leaning on the fact that you saved Jenny's life so you can keep the connection alive!"
"...Heh, you scoundrel — your friend's woman!"
"Love is won by conquest!"
At Dupyo's shout, Ryu-hwa gripped his spear and took his stance.
Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo! SLAM!
Raising a colossal whirlwind, the Ink Mace spun and bored into the earth with a roar.
"If you can beat me!"
Dupyo's answer was concise.
A tree screamed.
CRAAASH!
A giant tree, so thick that three or four grown men could barely encircle it with arms outstretched, could not withstand the Ink Mace Samdopyo swung and toppled slowly sideways.
"Hoo, huff!"
"...Heh, you sneaky rat — huff!"
As if he and the mace had become one, Dupyo's body spun through the air alongside it, then swung at Ryu-hwa's waist. It was blindingly obvious: a single hit and he would end up just like that giant tree a moment ago. But Ryu-hwa evaded skyward even as he thrust his spear forward.
Sh-sh-sh-shunk!
The motion appeared to be a single strike, yet the stabbing spear-tip had already multiplied into dozens. That was Mong Ryu-hwa's specialty.
'Which one is real?'
Dupyo glared at the spear-tips closing in on him. He knew that if he simply dodged, he risked being overwhelmed in the exchange.
"Son of a — dammit!"
Thwack-thwack-thwack-THWACK!
Dupyo could not block them and rolled aside cursing. The spot where he had stood was turned into a honeycomb of spear holes.
Every image he had seen — all of them had been real.
"Hwooh, huff."
"Haah, haah."
Both men's neat clothes were now dyed red, and the once-peaceful hillside lay in ruins all around. Their ragged breathing told how ferociously they had fought.
"Hwooh — let's settle this in one go."
"Haah, haah. Fine, you bastard who ought to be struck by lightning."
The voices were exhausted, but their eyes on each other blazed like roaring flames. For the briefest of moments, as if by agreement, the two of them steadied their breathing.
Long, low breaths poured from their lips, and the instant those breaths ceased, furious gales raged around both their bodies.