The Fruit Called His Name
Bertrand was caught off guard. He had never expected the blade, shortened until it was no longer than a dagger, to come riding down the length of his own sword. Sparring with his father, a Master, had thrown plenty of unpleasant surprises at him, and he smothered the jolt of shock at once and committed.
Steel shrieked. Chris's descending sword slammed into the guard that divided edge from hilt and stopped there. He had meant to split that guard and take the wrist beyond it—or, failing that, at least the fingers—but the guard held.
Chris hauled back, trying to free the blade. In the same instant Bertrand pushed exactly as hard as Chris pulled and laid his sword flat, and Chris's weapon jammed fast in the guard. While Chris strained to wrench it loose, Bertrand's empty hand crashed into his face.
The punch landed with a meaty crack. It was a vicious blow. Blood sprayed from Chris's nose as he went down. He had taken the hit on purpose, ready to lose at about this point, but the fist carried more force than he had bargained for.
Easy, you little shit. Hit softer.
Chris went limp and played unconscious. Bertrand looked down at him and spoke.
"A fine match."
The Count's household mage came forward to treat him. As the staff neared his face, Chris opened his eyes as if he had only just come to and thrust out a palm to stop it.
"I'm all right."
"That nose will make breathing miserable. A little healing, and you'll be comfortable."
"I'm not particularly fond of magic."
"Why not...?"
"A wandering mage raided our village and slaughtered everyone in it. My parents included."
"Ah. I see."
The mage's regret was genuine.
"Then allow me to apologize in their stead."
"It isn't something you need to apologize for."
Chris had refused treatment because he had deliberately remade his face. The magic towers of Grant Kingdom had warrants out for him and had scattered composite sketches across the land. To slip past them he had shaved bone, pulled his fangs, torn flesh, and shifted the fat beneath his skin.
He had endured agony past reason to make that face into someone else's entirely. Let a healing spell so much as touch a bloody nose, and the features he had forced into a new shape would slide back to what they had been. The lie existed to prevent exactly that.
Bertrand held out a hand to where Chris lay. Chris took it and rose.
"You're remarkable."
"No. You are."
Applause broke over them.
"A splendid match."
"Sir Bertrand was magnificent."
Jerry clapped as well, though his face had gone sour. Watching Timothy fight this time—three times faster than when the two of them had crossed blades—he understood at last that the man had been holding back against him. The knowledge left a bitter taste.
Before the applause could die, the Count moved. A moment ago he had been behind the dining table. The next, he stood in front of Chris.
"A curious fellow."
"My lord?"
Without asking leave, the Count seized Chris's wrist. Chris's body jerked to pull free, and at the last instant he made himself stop.
"My son stands at the threshold of Master."
Set beside the movement the Count had just shown them, Bertrand's own did not look like that at all. Chris saw no profit in saying so, and he played along.
"Is that so?"
Parents overvaluing their children was hardly strange.
"Congratulations."
"And yet, in the strength and speed housed in the body, you stand above him."
Bertrand started.
"Father, is that true?"
"It is. This one's body is a Master's."
He had hidden it as thoroughly as a man could hide anything, and still a Master's eyes had taken the measure of it. Chris widened his own in feigned shock, covering how inconvenient that was.
"Truly?"
The Count's expression turned grave.
"You didn't know?"
"No, my lord. If I had, I wouldn't have gone to a baron's manor. I'd have sought a great domain ruled by a high noble. A count, at the least."
"How is that possible?"
"How is what possible?"
"How did a clumsy man who can barely govern his mana train his flesh to that level?"
Chris couldn't answer at once. He was reaching for the lie he had prepared long ago, and in the pause the Count smiled.
"I'll see for myself."
The Count's mana drove in through Chris's wrist. It was rude, and it was dangerous, but Chris held still.
From the moment that hand closed on him, he had expected something of the sort and prepared for it. He had shut the channels of his Iron Body and left another path open.
The Count sent his mana as far as Chris's lower abdomen, then cocked his head.
There's no mana reservoir.
It made no sense. On the chance he had simply missed it, he searched every corner of the body, and when he wondered whether Chris might have built a reservoir near the heart the way mages did, he searched as far as the heart itself.
Nothing.
A short while later the Count drew his mana back and asked.
"You never formed a mana reservoir?"
"No."
Bertrand passed surprise and arrived at outright shock.
"A man without a mana reservoir fought me to a draw? Father, that doesn't make any sense!"
"I agree."
The Count's confusion was only natural. Nowhere in Chris's body had mana pooled. In that condition a man simply could not draw out strength past human limits, and yet his opponent had done exactly that—and to the level of a Master besides.
Chris was certain the man would fail to read his body properly. Not even the magic towers had anyone who had learned Iron Body. A knight was never going to recognize it.
The Count asked.
"You learned a mana cultivation method, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Recite the formula."
"Here?"
"A crude method that couldn't even form a reservoir. No one in this room is going to steal it. Recite it without worry."
Moments ago, Chris had told the mage who tried to heal him that the village where he lived had been massacred. It was a lie, but not one invented out of nothing.
When he escaped the magic tower he had fled south with nothing on him, and he entered a mountain village looking for clothes—more precisely, looking to steal them—only to walk into a slaughter. Bandits had overrun the place and killed every soul in it.
Rage took him, and he beat every last bandit to death. In the midst of it he captured the most skilled of them, a former mercenary, and took the man's mana cultivation method. By then he had already resolved to pass himself off as a knight, and he had been searching for a method good enough to fool other people.
Chris recited the bandit's method, presenting it as something he had bought from a knight with coin. The nobles and knights who had been listening with sharp attention clicked their tongues in disappointment. It was no better than what they already knew.
When Chris finished, the Count's brow furrowed.
"Utterly ordinary."
Bertrand said, "Timothy, with a method like yours you could never set foot in a higher realm."
The Count asked, and his tone had gone grave.
"What happened to you?"
His hand had closed on his sword hilt. Everything about him said that the wrong answer would not be allowed to stand.
"There is something I can guess at..."
He opened with that and then shut his mouth, and the silence stretched until the Count pressed him.
"There is?"
"It's a little hard to say..."
"And why don't you want to say it?"
Chris gave a bitter smile.
"I told other people. Every one of them laughed at me."
"Laughed? Why?"
"They all decided it was a lie."
"I won't laugh. Tell me."
Chris swallowed and began to unwind the lie.
"When the villagers were massacred, I had gone out hunting, and that was how I kept my life. I turned my back on the village to escape the mad mage, but I had no property and no one who might give me work, so I drifted from village to village until I went back into the mountains. I made a living as a hunter, and that wasn't easy either. Every hunting ground rich in game belonged to the nobles, and most of the other forests already had hunters who treated them as their own territory. I was hounded. The territorial spite was vicious."
Bertrand cut in.
"With your skill you could have laid out a hundred village hunters."
"My body wasn't like this then."
Chris licked his lips and went on.
"Avoiding the lords' holdings, avoiding the claims of the hunters already there, I had no choice but to push into deeper mountains. Harsher ones. Mountains no human foot had ever touched, thick with the danger of getting lost and never coming out."
Then he suddenly raised his voice.
"And then, one day!"
The knights who had been listening flinched and sucked in a sharp breath.
"Hah—"
"I came face to face with it."
"With what?"
"A tiger with the face of a man."
Aaron, senior knight of Calmer Manor, looked to Baron Calmer.
"A manticore?"
"A manticore has a lion's body. Not a tiger's."
Chris ignored the murmuring around him and pressed on.
"There were wings on the man-faced tiger's shoulders."
"Wings? A griffin?"
"A hybrid."
"A chimera some mage made?"
Chris ignored the noise.
"Meeting that monster shocked me nearly to fainting. My limbs shook. My throat went bone-dry. I backed away in terror, and then—!"
"Then what? What happened?"
"I stepped on a dry branch. The monster fixed its eyes on me, and I understood. Ah. I'm dead. I die here. In a mountain hollow no human ever reaches, I become one meal for a monster. My bones stay here forever and weather away to nothing. And then—!"
"Then what?"
"A new monster appeared. A serpent so vast that, coiled, it was the size of a house, and stretched out it could easily surmount five castle walls. On its head was a horn sharp as a spear, and lightning crackled from it."
"What kind of monster is that?"
"I've never even heard of such a thing."
"Sounds like a spirit beast."
"A spirit beast?"
"Well, it uses lightning."
Chris was warming to the tale.
"The two unknown monsters crashed together in a terrible fight. Ink-black clouds boiled up, rain came slashing down, lightning flashed on every side, and the beasts howled. Mountain and stream, grass and tree, all of it shook with fear."
"If it calls the rain, it's a spirit beast all right."
Among the nobles, opinion settled on spirit beast.
"I flattened myself against the ground and watched them fight. I'd meant to run while the two monsters were busy with each other, but I ended up seeing it."
"Seeing what?"
"What did you see?"
The listeners had sunk completely into the story.
"I saw why the monsters were fighting."
"And what was that?"
"Where the winged monster stood guard, there was a plant pouring out light as bright as the sun."
Someone shouted.
"Sun Herb!"
"Good God—Sun Herb!"
Inwardly, Chris was thrown.
Sun Herb? What in the world is that?
He hid what he was feeling and kept talking, stealing glances as he went.
"There was fruit on that plant—"
Before he could finish, someone cut in.
"Sunfruit."
"It had borne sunfruit. No wonder spirit beasts would fight over it."
Chris was even more thrown.
And what is sunfruit supposed to be?
He was already in it. No turning back.
Chris carried the bluff onward.
"The monsters were tearing the mountain apart in a mad fight, and I—I was bewitched. By the shining fruit."
He stared into empty air with the glazed look of a man half asleep and reached out a hand.
"The fruit was calling me. It called to me."
"And then?"
"What happened?"
Chris smacked his lips.
"I went to it. I forgot the driving wind and rain, forgot the lightning tearing at my ears, and walked toward nothing but that shining fruit. Everything after that is faint in my memory. I picked the fruit and ate it, and afterward the suffering was so—"
"So what?"
"It was too hot."
It's called sunfruit. Hot ought to be about right.
"It felt as if my body were burning up."
Chris closed his eyes and opened his ears.
"You ate it with no preparation at all. Of course it would."
"It's a wonder you didn't burn to death."
The guess was right.
Relief went through him, carefully kept on the inside.
Thank God for that.