A Knight Gets Reined In? (1)
…He wanted to rest.
How long am I supposed to live like this?
He could no longer properly remember the last time he had slept, and the fatigue never found a gap in which to ease. Every day he worked through the night, and even after the work was finished there was no such thing as rest. The next task was always waiting, or else it sprang up out of nowhere.
"…Haha."
At last a madman's laugh broke from his mouth.
Back in his teens, when he still attended the middle academy, summer recess had meant enjoying the season at the villa his house owned. Maids looked after him. He never had to do anything tiresome, and the family chef saw to three nourishing meals a day, properly balanced.
And now.
"How did I end up like this…."
Damian Paulet looked over his present lot and let out a miserable complaint.
"Assistant Instructor."
"…."
"Here's your meal! You have to eat, you know!"
"L-Layla. Th-thank you for bringing the food, but the bowl…."
"Oh, this? The knight said I had to use this bowl, no matter what! He said it's the Assistant Instructor's personal dish, and that I'm only ever to serve your food in this one!"
"…That lunatic."
"Pardon?"
"…I wasn't speaking to you, Layla. That rotten—!"
"Hmm?"
She blinked, plainly unable to see what was wrong, and Damian was reminded all over again that this maid was of the same stock as that man.
There was not one normal person in this entire household!!
A dog bowl?! At least treat me like a person!!!
The Assistant Instructor, Damian Paulet, lived in a kennel of barely eighteen square feet. No—a boarding house. Tears bright in his eyes, he looked up at the sky, and on the wood someone had carved, with painstaking care:
And why, damn it all, was the sky so clear.
Get struck by lightning!
…Though he suspected the true reason he could not bring himself to rebel was the simple fact that a lightning bolt would not kill that monster.
Damian was wretched.
Damian Paulet.
Tenant of the kennel set up in the yard, not quite eighteen square feet across—no, of a slightly (?) modest boarding house.
He had meant to spend the recess in the Academy dormitory. Instead, damn it all, he had been forced into boarding that was anything but the dorms.
The reason?
…Now that he tried to say it aloud, the bottled rage flared so hard he doubted the words would come.
For once the damned instructor had left his post, and Damian had actually been resting, when the man returned without warning, seized him brutally by the back of the neck, and came to collect him.
"You're working over the break, too. Where do you think you're going, trying to rest?"
…He could say without hesitation that it had been the most terrifying moment of his life.
But now, what he had believed to be the most terrifying moment of his life had changed.
This is hell.
Damian Paulet thought it through gritted teeth. His instructor, he was certain, had no conscience.
Damn it! Why am I the one working in this doghouse?!
Swallowing his tears, the sole resident of the cozy kennel prepared in the yard—no, the boarding house—threw himself feverishly into the paperwork.
Originally, it was work the instructor should have handled.
Instructor or lecturer, the staff of the Academy stayed busy even on days of recess. Preparing lectures for the next term was one thing, but there were, at a baseline, more than ten documents that had to be submitted, and beyond those each department had its own assortment of requests. Because of it, professors, lecturers, and instructors alike tore in and out of the Academy in a daze, buried under things they had to ask for.
Thanks to that, Damian was becoming a master of paperwork that had never been in his fate, and the further he went, the more skillfully he found himself handling the work.
But as for him—
I am not happy about this at all, damn it!
Nothing rose in him but the urge to retch.
The noble's son was gone: the boy who had once not even known how to swear, and had armed himself in elegant dignity. In his place, Damian was turning into a proper drudge.
Full of complaints, he wanted nothing more than to bolt this very instant. Regrettably—
"Assistant."
He flinched.
"Y-yes! Instructor…!"
He shot upright by pure reflex and stuffed the discontent away at once. He did not dare show so much as a hint of complaint in front of that man.
The man—Lee Han—came on slowly, streaming a miserable sweat, and looked over the mountain of documents Damian was processing.
"You're handling it pretty well. See? Work somewhere with good outside air, and the efficiency goes up."
"…."
"Kidding. Just finish that quickly. Then you'll have time to rest, too."
"…This was originally your work, Instructor."
"And?"
"…."
"Those eyes are insubordinate, Assistant."
"…I will lower them."
"Yeah. Quick to read a room, as always. Wise."
"…."
"Don't curse me in your head."
"…Not even I can do anything about my own heart."
"Want me to test that?"
"…Damn it."
"Heh. Look at him. Insolent—filthy with it. That because you're a noble?"
"Please, just stop this damned discrimination against nobles!"
Half a year had already passed since he had been set to rolling under the instructor. In that time, the lines Damian heard most often were generally these.
"Because you're a noble? Your work is just…."
"Because you're a noble? No manners."
"Because you're a noble? Nasty look in your eyes."
And so on!
He was still in the bright prime of youth, and already it felt as if a sickness of bottled rage were coming on. Damian's blood pressure kept climbing, and at some point he had become a regular in the Academy's recovery room.
And did you know what was even more shocking?
He still had two and a half years of this left….
That was the truly horrific part: a nightmare that sent a shudder through him whether it was night or day.
Perhaps it was the stress. The priest of the recovery room had put it this way.
"Hmm. Have you been under a great deal of stress lately, by any chance?"
"I-is there some kind of problem…."
"You're showing signs of stress-related hair loss. So young, and yet somehow…."
"…."
"A-are you all right?"
"…Sob."
"A-are you crying?"
At the age of twenty, he had acquired stress-related baldness.
…It was the worst.
This is honestly miserable.
To Damian, everything was filthy and foul.
Kwaaang! Kang—!
Goddamn it. He dumps the work on me and just trains.
The complaints sprang up on their own, but he could not bring himself to rebel. That the man held his life in his fist was reason enough, but still….
Rebel against a monster like that, and then what?
Kwaaang! Krrrack—!!
The sandbag—an iron-bar sandbag made by binding dozens of heavy iron rods together with chain—changed shape every time it was struck, folding in on itself. At the tenth blow, exactly, the chains could endure no longer and came apart….
He watched, and still could not believe it.
"Hss. Why is the durability this garbage? I buy from that old man because I trust the quality. This won't do."
"I don't think the quality is the problem…."
"Then what is?"
"…You're asking because you truly don't know?"
Faced with an instructor whose face said he genuinely had no idea, Damian lost whatever he had been about to say.
And at the same time, he went cold.
With good reason.
Has he gotten even bigger? No. That's not it…. Has he simply developed further?
The man who had already toyed with the vice-captain of House Paulet had, in half a year, grown even more outrageous. Damian did not think that was his imagination.
He was strong. Beyond any hope of measuring.
…Even if the knights of our house mobbed him now, I don't think it would work.
As a descendant of House Paulet, a knightly house of some renown, he had his pride in the family's knight order. But Damian was objective, and through no wish of his own the things he had been through had sharpened his eye.
In that sense, the instructor's skill was not at a level the knights of House Paulet could handle.
At the very least….
Maybe it would take a great noble house's knight order…?
Unaware that the man had already clashed with the knight order of just such a house, Damian cautiously tried to gauge his instructor's skill.
And he regretted it.
Why had he run his mouth for no reason on the day of the entrance ceremony, gotten himself tangled up with a monster like that, and been condemned to live like this?
Empty bravado. The tail end of a knightly house, and he couldn't even tell at a glance that the other man's skill was nothing ordinary?! An idiot, through and through…!
And the greatest idiot of all was himself: the one who had failed to recognize a skilled man, shot his mouth off, and now lived in a doghouse.
Damian cursed himself, and the nausea rose all over again.
"…Damn it."
"I can hear all of it, Assistant."
"…."
"Quit crying. I even built you the boarding house with my own hands, didn't I? A house that charges no rent and puts meals out without a miss! Where else are you going to find a deal like this?"
"I do not want that deal."
"Tsk, tsk. Because you're a noble? Belly's nice and full. Spoiled rotten."
"Please, just…!"
He was a noble whose only wish was that the discrimination would stop.
This one has to be ground down. Give him time he doesn't need, and he'll only start scheming.
He had not thrown that worthless little noble into a place like a doghouse and set him to work merely so that he himself could take it easy.
…Of course he also had no wish to do the paperwork, so he was well aware that he was using the boy.
But one of the reasons he treated him this harshly was that he knew exactly what kind of fellow the brat was, and so he ground him all the harder. Half a year of working the boy under him had taught him that much. Damian was, by nature, the worthless type.
Which meant he must never be indulged, and never let off the leash. Give that one even a little slack and he would swell with pride, and the old habits would come right back.
And how could he be so sure?
I've seen at least a hundred of that type. Couldn't have been fewer.
For a man who, in his previous life as a noncommissioned officer, had seen washouts beyond counting, the certainty came naturally.
Even so, difficult type though he was, Damian had a few points at which he stood out.
He read a room well. And he had, at minimum, a conscience and a sense of morals….
In other words, there was room for him to turn himself around.
Just from what Lee Han had heard of the boy's showing during the monster crisis, his nature did not seem purely vicious.
Washouts usually come in two kinds.
Those who become people if you set them straight, and those who stay beasts no matter how you set them straight.
In that sense—
This bastard can become a person.
That he was the former was what mattered.
The first meeting had been foul, and everything since had been as filthy as could be, but even dislike, given time, ripens into a kind of attachment. And since the boy was one of the students he taught, Lee Han had decided to take up the challenge.
Keep grinding him.
Grind him hard enough to drive him mad, and someday he would become a person. They said even a bear turned human after a hundred days. With three years, why wouldn't it be possible?
Hmm. Once the paperwork's done, should I have him dig a drainage ditch, too?
And then he would say it.
"Ah. Word is you can't dig there. Fill it back in."
Like that.
Lee Han had already perfected, down to the last detail, a curriculum for grinding one man under wholly unreasonable orders.
That was when it came.
Knock, knock.
"Excuse me, Brother."
Someone had come to intrude upon Lee Han's precious time.
"…You again."
Lee Han's expression soured. Lately, just looking at the man who turned up at this hour was enough to start a headache.
He made no effort to hide how little he wanted the visitor there, but the other paid it no mind at all.
"Might we have a conversation today?"
"…No."
"Dear me. What a pity."
"…."
"Even so, if we might only speak…."
"…Please. Just go."
Lee Han said it while looking at the priest who would not stop trying to lead him down a religious path.
"A man they call a cardinal can't have this kind of time to spare."
"Hehe. And how long has it been since I set down a seat far too grand for me? I am merely one ordinary believer now. Please, treat me at your ease."
"…."
…As if he would treat him at ease.
Better a man who showed his hostility from the start. Someone this kind was far harder for a knight to face.
…This is a heresy inquisitor?
A heresy inquisitor who had once been a cardinal was a formidable enemy without equal.
And with good reason.
One light poke, and his bones would break.
Because the man was nothing if not a "normal adult," the sort whose mere appearance sent the whole Confucian soul—reverence for one's elders—surging up inside him.