A Knight Hates Romance-Fantasy Events (1)
Creak.
The boy drove the pedals with everything he had. The harder he worked them, the more speed he gathered, and the bicycle shot ahead — and every time it did, sweat poured off him as if it were raining. It was an autumn dawn, the heat largely broken, the air gone cold enough that sweat ought to have flown from him at once. The boy's showed no intention of stopping.
Rattle. Look closer, and the bicycle was heaped with cargo. With that much freight, of course the sweat came down like rain. He was hauling a load absurdly vast for so small a body. And yet the boy found every bit of it nothing but satisfying. Hard, yes. Even so.
"Here — today's milk and the paper!"
"Thank you again, Patrick. Order from you, and it certainly comes fast."
"Haha! Please keep using Patrick's Delivery Service!"
Money was coming in. Hard as the work was, he couldn't help being satisfied.
"As it happens, I've already put the word out among the neighbors. I told them how diligent you are, and a few of them said they'd like to meet you."
"Ah! Th-thank you, ma'am! You'll be blessed for it!"
"Ho ho. Then you'll make it a little cheaper for me, won't you?"
"That I can't do."
"...You really are firm."
"Hehe. Please understand, ma'am. I'm still nothing but in the red. Once I turn a profit, I'll pile the perks on my regulars, and the day will come when I repay the kindness. I swear it!"
"Ho ho. I'll look forward to that."
The boy smiled with complete confidence and once more drove the pedals hard.
Patrick. Nearly a month had passed since the teenage orphan of the Imperial Streets came to the kingdom, and already the boy was sinking quickly into its life.
...Honestly, it still feels like I'm dreaming.
Patrick remembered. No — he would probably remember it for the rest of his life. The day the Magic Tower, that hated enemy, collapsed overnight, and at last even the Spring Fairy was restored. Riding the fairy's spring wind alongside the knights....
Truth be told, once the Tower vanished and the Spring Fairy returned, he had considered remaining in the empire.
Even so — not the empire!
However completely the Magic Tower, root of all that evil, had fallen, and however much spring had been won back, the empire Patrick saw was still a wreck. The reckoning was short. War might break out at any moment, and even if a new emperor rose, chaos would fill the land for a good while. So he put his mind to it and went on to Pendragon exactly as planned.
And now, as if to prove the choice had been the right one, he was steadily opening his first business.
He had capital saved from life on the Streets, and he had taken on a little debt at the bank, but for a first venture it was a very decent start.
While no other merchant has planted a flag, I have to get big, and fast!
Delivery. At its simplest, newspapers and milk; writ larger, fruit, grain, and whatever else came in on an order, carried to the door on the day promised. It was still crude, and he was desperately short of hands, so for now he was only killing himself running the routes alone. But if the customers seeking him kept multiplying and he gathered proper people, it would swell into a considerable enterprise.
Someone might sneer and call it a child's whim, a dream too big for the boy who dreamed it. Patrick had seen hope in the work. His head brimmed with ideas for businesses beyond delivery, and so he was not afraid of failing.
...I was never this bold.
He found it strange that he was living with such heat. So this was why the place you lived mattered....
"—and why a guardian matters."
......Patrick scratched his cheek, a little shy. He was thinking of the knight who had readily taken him in. Bringing down the Magic Tower would alone have been a debt for life, and he had never imagined the man would look after him in the kingdom as well. Think it through, and the reason Patrick could start a business with an easy heart, young as he was, was that the knight had vouched for him. Because that name had been lent, he had been able to join the merchants' guild. The way things stood, it felt as if the debts he owed only kept growing.
Well. What the benefactor himself actually said was something else entirely.
All he wanted was for the boy to eat well and live well.
......I'll repay it. I will. With interest — a hundredfold. No. A thousandfold!
Words like those only set a fire in Patrick's chest. He might have come off the Streets, but he had never made money by theft or anything unlawful, and he had sworn to be a son his late parents would not be ashamed of. How could he dare repay nothing to the man who had avenged them? It was not how a person ought to live, and Patrick's pride would not allow it.
I succeed. No matter what...!
Patrick, a boy still only in his teens, burned with ambition, carving into himself the resolve to make the business work and become a great merchant whose name would ring through this kingdom — no, across the continent.
......For the present, he was still living under someone else's roof.
"...Once the money's together, independence comes first. Honestly."
Haa...!
He let out a sigh far too deep for his years, shook his head as if to cast the worry off, and decided to put his mind on the work in front of him. No good came of gloomy thoughts.
"The next stop should be...... huh?"
Squeeeak....
Patrick, for whom even frantic pedaling fell short, brought the bicycle to a sudden halt. The distance was considerable, but somehow he had seen a familiar face.
"That person is...."
Striking red hair, and a complexion steeped in something dark. He looked like a man, but had only dressed as one: a priest, and at present a lodger in the very household where Patrick was staying. ...No. Clearly something else.
Did they call him an intern?
Father Pierre was pacing the street, and Patrick blinked.
In the yard before Lee Han's house stood ten kennels — no, boarding houses. One for the assistant instructor, nine for the interns. The lettering alone was enough to show how devotedly the landlord had built them.
He had once picked up carpentry as a hobby, and a kind maid who was terribly good at breaking things had forced the skill higher while he repaired the damage day after day. So although the outsides were nothing to look at, the houses the knight had raised were reasonably snug and comfortable. There was no denying they resembled kennels. Even so, one person could sleep in each well enough, there was room to set belongings down, and a fairly soft blanket had been laid out. For anyone pursuing a minimalist life, they might almost have been ideal. The finish and the comfort, in short, were not bad. And so.
"...Lately I feel myself growing fond of this house."
"It's galling, but he really did build these well."
"A few drops fell the day before yesterday, didn't they? Not one of them leaked. Even when the storm hit a fortnight ago, the place didn't so much as flinch. Remarkable, truly."
"S-somehow it feels more and more like we're being raised."
"......"
Haaaa...!
The nine interns — no, the inquisitors — let out a heavy sigh. They were not people made for leisure like this, and to have fallen into being kept was bleak beyond words. Even now heretics must have been springing up like weeds, and here they sat, unable to cut them down, living soft. It ached somewhere in the chest.
"—Oh, shut the hell up. Half the people you 'cut down' are innocent, you scumbag butcher bastards."
"......"
"Anyway, you're only running your mouths because your bodies are comfortable. Lazy to the bone. Tsk."
"...Mmm."
A flippant way of talking that somehow called the landlord knight to mind. But the one who had spat it was not the knight who had reduced them to this. It was someone else entirely.
"Assistant Damian...."
Damian Paulet, scion of a renowned knightly house, and for more than half a year now their senior — if you could call him that — ground under the knight.
"Easy living, huh? In my day I didn't even have time to loaf around the way you do. Tsk! Fine. It isn't your fault. The instructor's busy with his own training lately and he's decided not to blow, so you're like this. Haa.... The world's turned upside down. Upside down."
With other people Damian was ordinarily polite. The moment he decided someone stood beneath him, he used a tongue no different from a street thug, and he used it without hesitation. One might have wondered whether he had forgotten what these men had been. Inquisitors. Was he not afraid of what would come after?
"And you little shits! Not assistant. Assistant Instructor! Where does some scrap of an intern get off talking to me like an equal?"
"I-I'm sorry...."
"Does sorry end your internship?"
"Th-that is...."
"Why the glare? Ah. Grievances overflowing, are they? Getting cursed out by a mere assistant hurts your feelings? Oh dear. I failed to recognize the lord inquisitor. What a grave mistake I've made!"
"......"
"Answer me!"
"I-I'm sorry...."
"Does sorry end your internship?"
"...Khk."
Today, though, his tongue was a notch rougher than usual. Because he had been awake since the day before yesterday? No. All-nighters were nothing new anymore. So Damian Paulet was not angry.
"Don't cry. Cry all you like — nobody here is on your side. Honestly, how soft were you raised? Well, the temple probably cooed over you no matter what you did, so of course you grew up acknowledging no one above you. The instructor said you lot were worse than mad dogs. I see why. I see it."
"—!"
"Why deny it? Blood up? Then take it to the instructor. Ah, but you can't, can you? You're the assassins who jumped him first. ......Filthy trash, hawking the name of the Light of Radiance."
"......!"
He despised them, and that was why the words cut.
What's wrong with these people? They don't improve at all.
At first Damian Paulet had simply been glad to have bodies he could grind beneath him. Live with them for a little under two months, and the gladness died.
These bastards are hopeless...!
Was it some Trait inquisitors carried? Or had they been brainwashed past saving? Whatever the name for it, something basic a person ought to have had been cut out of them. It might have been sympathy. It might have been guilt. It might have been the chivalric righteousness the instructor mentioned in passing. Even Damian, whom some called a wreck of a character, had sympathy, and at least a scrap of guilt. He saw none of it in these men. The talk he had heard today was enough.
Executing heretics. You're the heretics.
They did not hesitate to kill. Let an order come in, and they carried it out without a hitch. Assassins whose wills had been removed. As of today he was certain of it. These bastards were puppets — dolls swinging power behind the great Light of Radiance, using that name as a shield.
Ugh. Why are freaks like this under me?
The interns disgusted him. He wished they would simply vanish. They worked well enough, but the sight of them was revolting past bearing. He was coming to understand exactly why inquisitors were shunned, and why the world called them something to fear. And he was certain of one thing more.
These bastards, without a doubt....
The moment a chance appeared, they would cause an incident.
—I'm being suspected.
One pair of eyes flashed where no one could see. Damian Paulet's danger had shot straight up.
...He isn't a fool.
Watch only what he did, and he looked like the typical noble heir who acknowledged no one above him. His mind turned quickly, though, and his eye for things was not bad.
Dangerous. Should I deal with him?
......No. That was not a good choice. He might look crushed flat by fatigue, but a student beaten and ground by that knight every day had a toughness and a skill rare for his age, however forced the gaining of them had been. Fail to finish it in a single stroke, and the result would be ugly. So.
For now, I stay quiet.
It was not the worst yet. A chance would come. A chance to escape the knight, and to carry out the other mission the temple had given.
Irene Windler....
A chance to take her. A law as fixed, in a romance fantasy, as pasta and baguette.
......A heroine, by rights, was often targeted.