Episode 1 – My Story
I was a slave.
I hadn't even turned three when my parents sold me to a slaver. I don't resent them. ...No. Let me correct that. I don't even remember their faces. They sold me right around the time my mouth was learning its first words—how was I supposed to remember what they looked like? The only scene that stays perfectly clear is me sucking on my fingers and trotting after the slaver, obedient as a pup.
Child slaves sold remarkably well. Spell-peddlers were especially fond of us. Was it because we made convenient stock for human experiments? Or because the greedy pigs in the temples happened to have a taste for children? Either way, we moved.
I was sold to one of the spell-peddlers.
The slaver called me an unlucky bastard, I think. For my part, I'll offer a small private objection. Better to be sold to a mage than fitted out for some old men's filthy appetites.
Ten years as a spell-peddler's slave. A mage's slave.
Of the hundred slaves hauled through that door, three people lived. No—three specimens. I was one of them.
The mage's experiment was to draw cells from monsters and graft them into human bodies, all in pursuit of a strengthened frame. Children who failed to adapt, or simply failed to endure, burst where they stood, or became something neither human nor monster and were dropped into the incinerator. In that laboratory, both endings were treated as a matter of course.
My body was weak back then. My will, unfortunately, was not.
The will to live. I had that.
I was still young enough not to understand what death even was, and I hungered to survive all the same. I endured the experiments with everything in me, and little by little I began to give the mage the results he wanted.
I showed an aptitude for the factors of two monsters in particular—the gnoll, the man-dog, and the man-eater. The mage was delighted.
...And then he tried to dissect me.
Thud!
"...Huh?"
Crack. Can a person's head really split that easily?
That was my first murder.
A slave is not supposed to be able to kill a master. What I understood in that instant was that the Slave Brand does not stir unless killing intent is confirmed. I had none. I only thrashed on reflex and happened to tap him—and the mage died.
A miracle, if you can call it that, where accident and luck landed on the same spot.
...Should I count the mage's own mistake as part of it?
After all, I was the one carrying the man-eater's factor. A troll's. What kind of sane person puts a knife first to a child who no longer has a child's strength, but a monster's, and calls the thing a dissection?
No wonder mages are despised as spell-peddlers. Every last one of them is out of their mind.
At any rate, the master died, and I was freed on the spot. I meant to walk straight out of the laboratory.
"Well, now. Isn't this interesting?"
"...Ah."
Regrettably, I did not get out.
I should have been quicker. Of all days, the mage died on the very day the organization funding him came to call, and they caught me standing over what I'd done.
"Child. Choose. Will you come with me, or die where you stand?"
"...I'll come with you."
"Smart."
The organization backing the mage.
They were none other than the assassin order called the Black Moon.
I was thirteen.
I became an assassin.
The assassin order wanted powerful soldiers. Soldiers who carried a monster's abilities and could kill with equal skill.
From what I heard, it was all to overthrow some kingdom. Assassins, of all people, setting out to topple a kingdom—looking back on it now, the world really was at the end of its rope.
Still, I was useful, and usefulness is what let me live. They raised me as an assassin, and for the first time I lived something like a human life. Every day they fed me poison to build a tolerance, or put me to torture to build a tolerance for that, and the rest of it was no more human than the laboratory had been. Even so, I ate meals that deserved the name, and I had a bed where I could sleep a sleep that deserved the name. That alone was enough to teach me what human was supposed to mean.
So I held no grudge against the order.
About five years. That was how long they spent turning me into a professional.
"Prepare for the mission."
"Yes, sir."
"Number 9 and Number 10 will be moving with you. Number 8, you look after them."
"...Yes, sir."
My name in those days was Number 8. Which meant seven people stood above me, and of course they did. The assassin orders weren't fools. Would they really pin the overthrow of a kingdom on a single mage? They must have sponsored quite a few spell-peddlers, because the order had no shortage of people like me—bodies with strange gifts, or powers that didn't belong to ordinary flesh.
Number 9 and Number 10, for the record, were the other two who had survived the same experiments. We got along terribly. The order itself was built so that friendship couldn't take root, but more than that, they hated that I was younger than they were and still held the higher number.
...Childish little bastards.
Or maybe it was precisely because they were childish.
"Die, Number 8!"
"If you just weren't here...!"
Eaten up with inferiority, Number 9 and Number 10 came at me, and I went for them in turn, because I intended to live. It was a vicious fight. I had the upper hand.
They should have understood something.
"If you wanted a higher number, you should have worked harder than me."
Splurt!
"Ghk—!"
"H-how..."
"Why do you think my number's higher? Next life, do try to be smarter."
Obviously. My number was higher because I was plainly stronger than they were. And they were idiots who couldn't even see why.
"Haa. So what am I supposed to do about this?"
I had managed to kill them both, and I wasn't particularly glad of it. Murder turned out to be this empty, this bitter. If I'd been happy about it, that would have been proof I'd gone mad right then.
What came after the bitterness, though, was worry. The order had raised those two as precious assets, and I had killed them. Would they try to kill me for it? I was badly afraid they would.
Fortunately—
"Huh?"
When I returned, the order had been smashed to pieces.
The plan to overthrow the kingdom had been exposed. The royal host had marched, and it had begun sweeping every assassin order off the map. At first I couldn't believe it. I knew how strong the order was. So I went through the safehouses and every other place I knew, and checked them one by one. All of them had been burned out, as if put to the torch. And then, decisively—
"...They really saw those gentlemen off in style."
Instructors and officers alike, every one of them beheaded and hung from spearshafts. Looking at that, I was finally sure.
Ah. The order was finished.
I was eighteen. At last I was truly free.
Two years after that.
I crossed into another country for the sake of a second life and worked hard at a fresh start, and the one thing I learned for certain was that the world is heartless—and far more vicious than it had been inside the order.
Was this just how the world worked?
"What a shitshow."
Life was hard enough that the first vulgar curse I ever learned lived in my mouth from then on. Making money. Keeping up with people. Finding work. I tried all sorts of things, and in the end the only trade I'd been taught was the blade, so I had no choice but to take the work I was best at.
"Youngest. You're too slow."
"Yes, I'm coming!"
I became a mercenary. More precisely, I became the youngest in a company that liked to boast it was mid-sized.
"Where'd you come from, and what were you doing?"
"Just knocking around the back alleys."
"Yeah? That walk of yours is pure assassin."
"Me?"
"...Tch. Guess not? Sorry. Must've been seeing things."
"Aw, what's there to apologize for? Haha."
...Sharp old bastards. I'd thought mercenaries were mayflies, living a day at a time, but their eyes were good and their instincts better. Well. That's why they could make a living by the sword.
From then on I worked to shed an assassin's bearing. The gait, the habits, all of it. I kept what I still needed, of course. Technique, and the habits that served it, had to stay useful.
So I lived the mercenary life, grew out of being the baby of the company, and spent four years wandering battlefields with a sword for my trade.
Thud!
"Ghk—!"
"You sons of bitches!!"
This goddamn life.
The client stabbed us in the back, and the company took a proper stoning for it. A rock caught me clean in the head. I went down, and my vision did nothing but blur.
...Play dead.
In truth, this wasn't enough to kill me. Please. What kind of body did they think this was? Die from a few rocks?
I can't win this.
Even if I showed every scrap of skill and every trick I'd been hiding, a handful of us were not going to beat well-trained soldiers. Playing dead and waiting for an opening was the better play. I trusted the fierce regeneration and the tough frame I had, and I endured the stones and the kicks from military boots.
Don't ask me how I could do that while everyone else was dying. I'd swallowed a lot of strange looks every time I bent down to pick up a cake of soap. Not killing them with my own hands was already me being generous.
I was busy justifying myself like that, and the back of my skull was throbbing, when it happened.
...Ah. I want a cola.
I remembered something I had forgotten. It wasn't a memory from this life. It was a memory from the life before.
I was twenty-four when I realized I was a reincarnator.
...No reincarnation bonus?
Sadly, after I survived I spent about five hours trying every method I could think of to call up a System Window, and nothing appeared.
"...What a shitshow."
If it was going to be like this, I should have left the memories buried.
The company was wiped out. When I, the survivor, reported the client's betrayal, the Mercenary Confederation moved at once to punish it.
Mercenaries are called butcher bastards—heartless men who'll do anything if the coin is right—but a contract has to be carried through, and if a client stabs you in the back, you do not let it go. That was the one absolute rule of the trade. The man had betrayed us to save a little money. The only answer was blood.
Under the Confederation, the domain the client ruled was torn up from end to end. Everything was plundered and taken. His blood kin in particular were sold into slavery, or took their own lives. They must have decided they couldn't endure a slave's life.
...I should retire.
Maybe it was because the memories of my past life had woken. Cruelties I used to force myself to overlook—the looting and the rest—had started to turn my stomach. It was a small revulsion, nothing I couldn't push through, but I had the feeling that the moment it disappeared, my humanity would wear away with it. Call it a finicky little thing called sensitivity.
"Might as well become a civil servant."
Once I'd decided to retire, I started studying. If you could so much as read, becoming some domain's Common Soldier was easy. But I'd seen what happened to a domain the Mercenary Confederation decided to step on. If I was going to do this, I meant to become a Common Soldier of a kingdom that wasn't about to fall apart.
"A provincial post is all well and good, but a capital civil servant—that's the real thing!"
For the record, I am not discriminating by region. I would appreciate it if no one misunderstood.
Anyway, I prepared for the exam as hard as I could, with everything I had, and at last...!
"Ho. You're impressive."
"Yes?"
"A talent like you, a Common Soldier? The rest of them must be blind. Starting today, you report to the knight order."
"...?"
I did not become a Common Soldier. I became a late-blooming Knight.
"Well, hell..."
Age twenty-seven. Thus was born Lee Han, the Knight.