The mountain was warm and gentle in spring.
It was a sight in which warm sunlight and flowers in full bloom seemed to caress every visitor.
An old man who had lived his entire life in winter walked along that lovely path.
As he had all his life, he limped, his back held straight.
He walked on, swinging the bottle of liquor in his hand.
After walking and walking, slowly, for a long time, he reached the summit.
There, he found a one-armed old man who had grown as old as the limping old man himself.
"You're late. Did you get drunk on spring instead of liquor and wander around?"
The man playfully chided him, the corners of his deeply wrinkled eyes curving gently.
Johan smiled back and shot back bluntly.
"I'm not a one-armed cripple like you, Hans. I'm a lame cripple, so it takes me longer even when I'm sober."
"Johan, are you still whining at your age? Look at me. Even when you cut one of my arms off, I didn't even let loose a hearty curse."
"Like hell you didn't. You just didn't say it. I can still picture you glaring at me with bloodshot eyes, your severed arm in your hands."
"Ha-ha, you'd taken my eye too. If I'd said anything, I would've been the only petty bastard, wouldn't I?"
"That attitude of keeping score is what's petty, you mercenary bastard."
They had spent their whole lives trying to kill one another.
Johan had taken one of Hans's arms, and Hans had taken one of Johan's eyes.
They should have been irreconcilable enemies, yet the two men smiled.
They had fought because their convictions differed, and both had lost much and taken much. But time was great.
Their resentment had crumbled and scattered in the wind, leaving behind nothing but an understanding deepened as if it had been carved into metal and stone.
At times, an enemy who understood one's intentions was more precious than family.
Before they knew it, the two had become friends more precious to each other than anyone else.
With a bitter smile at that truth, Johan tossed the bottle in his hand.
"Oh... soju? You managed to get this."
"It's a waste to shove it down your throat, but I was going to drink it too, so I went through the trouble of getting it from someone from my homeland."
Answering as if in mockery, Johan dropped down beside Hans.
He snatched back the bottle from Hans's hand and gulped it down.
Hans made a fuss at having what he had been given taken from him, but Johan paid him no mind. As the pungent intoxication seeped through him, old memories rose to the surface.
Born on a peninsula in the east, Johan's left leg had been severely shorter than his right from birth.
Naturally, he had started walking late and fallen often.
Back then, it had still been all right.
His parents had loved him no differently for having been born different.
The problem began when he was old enough to face the world.
"Already drunk? Your eyes are going slack."
"I'm remembering my childhood."
"Your childhood? You said you were a cripple, didn't you? Not your leg—your head."
"I can't say I wasn't."
Unlike his parents, the people of the world had not hesitated to scorn and pity Johan's uneven legs and limping gait.
Once he finally understood that he was different from others, the child shrank into himself and shut himself away in a small room.
He spent ten years that way.
Unable to bear watching their child waste away, his parents coaxed and persuaded their fifteen-year-old son into attending a swordsmanship dojo.
The dojo he attended reluctantly turned out to be quite nice.
Some boys tormented him, but others were kind.
As he spent time with children his own age, Johan began to understand what it meant to live among people.
Perhaps he might have lived an ordinary life in his homeland.
If not for the sudden misfortune that came for him.
"If only I'd come to my senses a little sooner... everything would've changed."
Soothing the burn within with liquor, Johan murmured.
Even in his life full of turmoil, the taste of its most miserable days was bitter.
Bitter enough to make him want to spit it out at once.
Along with the liquor he forced down his throat, the old memories returned.
It was when his fear of people had begun to lessen, even if only a little, after he started socializing at the dojo.
His parents were murdered.
Caught in the suddenly escalating conflict between criminal organizations, they bled to death.
The weak Johan could do nothing.
Other than surviving by sheer luck and watching his parents fall.
"I'll tell you this. I wanted to know why."
"Why what?"
"Why was my life ruined?"
"That's a stupid thing to dwell on."
"It is now. Still, it was desperate in its own way then, and I thought I'd found an answer. This leg."
Johan stroked his knee, where even the tiresome pain that had long plagued him had been dulled by the drink.
He recalled those days when, at least, his leg had not hurt.
The organizations that had murdered his parents had already been torn apart by the authorities and their leaders executed.
The answer found by a boy robbed even of anyone to take revenge on was, after all that circling, his leg.
His own troublesome leg.
If only his leg had been normal, he would not have heard that absurd rumor that some famed physician could cure every disease and gone out with them that day.
Then no one would have died, and they would have lived happily ever after.
That was what he wanted to believe then. No, what he had to believe.
If he thought his parents had died for no reason at all, he felt he would go mad.
So the boy took up a sword and left home.
He left behind his beloved homeland and his parents' graves, and stepped into the world.
To solve the cause of all his misfortune.
"There was nothing I didn't try to fix."
Twenty years had passed since the boy who knew nothing survived by being knocked down and broken time and again.
He had grown strong and amassed feats as astonishing as his strength.
He conquered the Great Labyrinth in search of a legendary panacea said to cure any disease.
He found the medicine, but it could not fix his leg.
A leg born short was not something that lay within the realm of recovery.
Believing only the claim that consuming it would change one's body, he killed a dragon and tore out its heart.
The dragon's heart changed his skeletal structure, but it did not lengthen his leg.
It could straighten twisted bones, but it could not create more bone where there was too little.
He went on countless adventures, succeeded, and failed again.
All the while, he could not fix his leg; only his hollow fame grew.
"You even became the imperial family's swordsmanship instructor just to fix one leg, did you not? You are a crazy bastard after all."
"That was my last hope at the time."
As he gradually grew weary of hollow glory, Johan arrived at the thought of the Holy Grail.
It was the priceless treasure said to have been acquired by the founding Emperor of the Empire.
The rumor that it granted any wish was far-fetched, but he was desperate.
As it happened, the Emperor invited him, a martial artist of great renown, to court, and Johan accepted.
Yet even after becoming the imperial family's swordsmanship instructor, he could not gain access to the Holy Grail.
Instead, on a spring day as lovely as today, he met a princess who was muffling her sobs in the rear garden of the imperial palace.
Johan smiled warmly as he recalled that encounter, one he had never forgotten even now.
"What is it? Why are you suddenly smiling?"
"You ought to smile when you remember a cherished bond."
The Emperor was dying, and two princes were fighting over the vacant position of Crown Prince.
With civil war all but certain, the princess was weeping.
She wept out of pity for the subjects who would bleed and die in the war, and because she hated herself for being unable to do anything.
In the woman's tears, rolling down her cheeks like silver beads, Johan saw himself.
He saw the boy who had shut himself in a room because he feared people, who had been too powerless to save his parents.
The moment the girl's tears fell upon a heart dried out by years and the world,
Johan resolved to make her Emperor, rather than either of the two princes crazed by ambition—the girl who wept with worry for the country and its people.
It was not for any grand reason.
He merely wished for a child who resembled him to achieve what he had not been able to achieve.
From then on, Johan did not hesitate.
He persuaded the princess to build a faction to oppose the two princes, and gave her victory in the civil war that followed the Emperor's death.
He then crushed the nobles who revolted, insisting that a woman could not become Emperor.
When the years filled with iron and blood, fire and bitter resentment came to an end, and peace arrived,
the princess, who might have been married off as if she were being sold, became Emperor, and the Sword Ghost who had resented his own life became the Sword Saint and held the Holy Grail in his hand.
"I never did fix this leg... but now, what does it matter?"
The rumors about the Holy Grail were false.
There had been no mystery and no miracle in the old pewter cup—only musty dust.
Still, Johan was not disappointed.
He simply smiled and left the imperial palace behind.
He politely yet firmly let go of the Emperor's hand as she asked him to remain by her side.
"Hearing that from the bastard who cut off my arm is a little irritating."
"If you had not gone and become a traitor, your arm would not have been cut off."
"Then we wouldn't be here drinking together either."
"I suppose that's true."
He had first met this troublesome friend, who grumbled so pettily, on a battlefield.
Hans, called the Mercenary King, was a powerful figure hired by the Second Prince.
A clash between him and Johan in the War of Succession had been inevitable.
Even after their first clash, the two had crossed paths and clashed many times in one way or another.
As the years in which they crossed weapons lengthened, their relationship changed as well.
From enemies without equal to worthy rivals, then to troublesome friends who clung to each other to a sickening degree.
And on the final day of their lives, to the only friends who climbed a spring mountain together to share liquor.
Looking back, it was a truly strange relationship.
Thinking that, Johan gave a hollow laugh and spoke softly.
"After living this long, I realized something. I thought I became unhappy because this leg of mine was like this, but that wasn't it."
"Have you finally gone senile? You've spent your whole life bitching about being lame, and now all of a sudden?"
Despite the blunt rebuke, Johan merely smiled.
There was nothing good about an inconvenient leg.
Walking was uncomfortable, running was difficult, and his joints hurt more with every passing year.
But this inconvenient leg had not been wholly bad, either.
When he had been weak, it was this leg that had saved his life by making his enemies look down on him.
There was nothing in the world that was only good, nor anything that was only bad.
Johan smiled, realizing only after he had grown old that what had made him unhappy was himself, for blaming nothing but the leg he had been born with.
At his unburdened laughter, Hans, who had been grumbling, finally laughed as well and rose to his feet. Then he pulled the spear he had embedded near a solid rock and aimed it at Johan.
"Well, all right. If you're happy, that's good enough. We drank good liquor, so while I'm in a good mood, let's get on with what we need to do."
"True. It would be strange if you and I died amicably admiring spring scenery."
Johan rose at his leisure, drew his sword, and aimed it at the lifelong rival and friend before him.
The peaceful spring day shattered in an instant as two martial artists who had reached the pinnacle faced each other.
The birds that had been watching idly took flight, and at the instant even the trees seemed to shrink back.
Looking at Johan past his spearpoint, Hans suddenly spoke.
"Hey, lame man."
"What is it, one-arm?"
"What would you do if all of this were a dream? If our whole lives were nothing but meaningless illusions?"
"Did you get sucked into some cult in your old age? What is this nonsense all of a sudden?"
"Just answer."
At his friend's urging, Johan lifted his head and looked up at the sky.
As he gathered his thoughts beneath the blue sky, he answered in a quiet voice.
"What difference does it make whether I am the Johan in a dream or the Johan dreaming it?"
"Huh. That's your answer?"
"Whether it is a dream or not, I am here now. Today is this beautiful, so that is enough."
Hans gave a snort of laughter at Johan's words, took something from his bosom, and threw it.
The tightly rolled scroll unfurled, blocking Johan's vision.
At that instant, the spear in Hans's hand pierced through space like a flash of light.
It pierced only empty space.
"You haven't changed at all since you were young."
"Isn't that exactly like me?"
A contest decided in a single exchange, in an eternity-long moment that carved a second into ever-finer pieces.
The victor was Johan.
With his sword buried in his old friend's chest, he grumbled.
Hans, for his part, smiled foolishly even with a sword through his chest as he answered.
"They said it is a scroll that wakes you from a dream."
"Hm?"
"The thing I threw at you. I couldn't use it. Thinking my life might be a dream makes me angry and scares me."
"You used that on me?"
"You said it did not matter to you, did you not? If you wake up from the dream, fix your leg and live well. Don't live like an idiot again."
"Nice speech and all, but that scroll you threw at me. It seems like a scam, does it not?"
As he spoke with Hans, whose breathing was slowly growing quieter,
the scroll, split in two, caught the wind blowing across the summit and flew away.
The butterfly within the scroll fluttered its wings as it rode the wind, but remarkably, nothing happened.
Hans was not disappointed.
Instead, he grinned and left the final words befitting him to his lifelong troublesome friend.
"If it isn't, it isn't. Just say I left a cool line behind on my way out."
"You were the one who really believed it, and you still like to put on airs."
Johan snorted and closed the eyes of his friend, who had left him with a spiteful jab to the very end. Then he turned and looked out over the mountain in spring.
Trees swayed their flowered branches lightly in the spring breeze.
A mountain dove flew somewhere with a branch in full bloom clamped in its beak.
White clouds drifted across the deep blue sky, with mountain peaks spread below them.
The peaceful landscape caressed the soul of the old man, ravaged by iron and blood, fire and bitter resentment.
"A dream..."
Though his friend had departed, Johan was not sad.
For a martial artist, there was no more fitting death than to die at the hands of a respected rival and friend.
Besides, Johan would soon follow Hans, so there was no reason to grieve.
Having sent off his friend so calmly, Johan awaited the end and mulled over the words Hans had left behind.
After being lost in thought for a long time, he began to speak.
To himself, who might be listening—or perhaps to someone else.
"Spring is this beautiful. So you must live your spring."
When Johan had with difficulty sat beside his friend and finished his request as he closed his eyes,
along with the falling petals, the life of the old man who had walked through blizzards all his life fell away.