How a Knight Treats Beasts (6)
“?”
The rose-pink eyes that the grandfather who once looked after Louise had praised—saying they put him in mind of pink pearls—were blown wide, blinking again and again.
The child was still hopelessly young, and a world that had changed overnight was terribly hard to adjust to. All she could do was look bewildered.
“Um... this isn’t my room, is it?”
“It is. From today, this is Lady Louise’s room. And please don’t stand on formality with us. Lady Louise is our mistress now.”
“??”
Only a few days ago, her room had been nothing like this. The walls were thrown together from rotten old planks, and the smelly straw hauled in from the stables had served as both blanket and bed.
But now...
“Th-this is a room? It’s bigger than the yard...?”
It was big. Enormously big. Pink light, the same color as the child’s eyes, filled the place. The ornaments were splendid, and the bed was not only soft and sweet-smelling, but large enough for a foal to lie down and roll about in. The floor was just as soft—far softer than any bed of straw.
At this rate, did she even need that intimidating bed? Couldn’t she simply sleep on the floor? She tried it, and it was wonderfully warm and pleasant. Then morning came.
“Oh, my lady!”
“We’re sorry! We’re sorry! P-please spare us!”
“P-please sleep in the bed, we beg you...!”
“????”
Louise had to tilt her head all over again. Puzzled as she was, she still did as the maids asked.
Those big sisters are nice!
They were the same maids who used to sneak her soft bread and fresh cherries behind the mean head maid’s back, so Louise was glad to go along.
More than that.
I like these big sisters!
Louise had always washed in cold water. These maids bathed her in warm water, wiped her down with care using a soft, warm towel, gave her something warm and sweet called cocoa, and even brought cherries and soft bread to put in her mouth. Louise couldn’t help but like them.
And so, over these past few days, she had been through a great many changes. A grand room and kind maids were changes enough, but the greatest of all was probably...
Are all the mean people gone?
The mean people. The aunties and uncles who had always made Louise’s life miserable had vanished. So had the ones whose very gaze made her shrink, who shouted at her and stuck out a foot to trip her. Louise was happier about their disappearance than about anything else.
...Even so, it nagged at her. Where had they gone?
“Big sisters, where did the mean aunties and uncles go?”
She only asked because she couldn’t hold the question in. And yet—
“Eek!”
“W-we’re sorry! We’re sorry! P-please spare us...!!”
“...Don’t mind these girls. They simply have rather severe trauma.”
“??”
“And those people... yes. They’re being scolded by Lord Santa at the moment. You may understand it that way.”
“Oh, I see!”
The instant Louise heard her precious friend’s name, she understood.
Santa’s strong, so he’s punishing the mean people!
Santa had even scolded the mean head-maid auntie. Of course he could punish the other mean people too.
While Louise was basking in that joy—
“Margrave Louise, Your Excellency! I-I beg you! P-please, just once! Meet me just once! Forgiveness...! Please, forgiveness, Y-Your Excellency...!!!”
...another strange person had come today.
Yes. In the space of a few days the room and the people had changed, but one of the things Louise found stranger still was that odd people kept turning up every single day. Whenever they came, they said things like “Please forgive me!” or “M-mercy!” or “I’ll give you everything I have,” and every time, Louise couldn’t understand.
Why are those grown-ups asking me to forgive them?
They were all people she was seeing for the first time. None of it made sense to her, and those adults were a burden, and a little frightening.
Even so, there was a reason Louise could keep from growing anxious.
Whump—!
“Whoa!”
Whenever one of those burdensome, scary people showed up, she had a friend who sent them flying far away.
“Santa!”
Louise ran straight at her friend to greet him, and her friend gathered her into a gentle hug.
“My lady—no, Your Excellency. You mustn’t come barreling into me like that. It’s dangerous.”
“Hehe. Santa’s strong, so it’s fine.”
“Good grief. With manners this rough, who’s ever going to marry you, Your Excellency?”
“What’s getting married?”
“Mm. It’s a thing that exists. ...There’s a great deal I’m going to have to teach you.”
“Huh?”
“...Never mind. For now, just run around and do whatever you feel like. For a child, playing beats everything.”
“Okay!”
Louise answered with all her strength, and whenever she answered like that, Santa always stroked her head.
Every time, Louise felt—
“Hehe!”
Warm. And snug. Even more than when she drank cocoa.
Santa’s just like a wizard!
The wizard from the fairy tale her grandfather used to read her. The kind who made anything at all, and gave fantastic gifts.
And so—
“Santa’s like a wizard!”
Louise spoke the feeling honestly.
But...
“...Where did you learn a curse like that?”
“Huh?”
“Ah. Never mind.”
“??”
Santa looked as if he had taken some enormous blow, and seeing her friend like that, Louise only blinked again, wondering if she had done something wrong. Innocent as could be.
“—Blood will tell, with a great house. To think she’d insult Sir Lee Han like that. Sharp little mouth.”
“I don’t believe she meant it that way.”
“Then what way did she mean it?”
“An intention you wouldn’t understand—you, who have lost a child’s innocence.”
“A child’s innocence? Hmm... I was pretty much the same as I am now, even when I was little.”
“......”
The secretary found herself suddenly curious about Simon’s childhood, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. And no wonder.
“Madam Secretary! We’re short on people!”
“Over here too!”
“Please send us more staff, I’m begging you...!”
“Haa...”
They were so busy there wasn’t even time to hear anyone’s story.
......The secretary, nothing more than an ordinary mortal, still could not understand why a man who claimed to be hunting a vampire had conquered Mordred and brought all this disaster down on them.
One week earlier.
The seven-day journey that had, by now, been given the name Wales Unification War had erupted utterly out of nowhere.
“...What the hell kind of bullshit is this?”
A dispatch from Wales—the domain of Mordred, famous for walking its own closed, solitary road—came flying at Simon as if it meant to run him down, and Simon, along with the entire guild, spent some thirty minutes in a state of pure stupidity.
Establish a guild in Wales. The funds will all be covered on this end.
It wasn’t that they had failed to understand the sentence. It took time to accept what it meant. That was how bewildering it was.
But whether they were bewildered or not...
Drag your feet, and I may well join hands with the Merchant Alliance.
Before a day had passed, House Orodo was annihilated, and the moment the second dispatch arrived, the guild was forced to seize hold of its wits. They might yield anywhere else, but handing a profit to the Merchant Alliance was the one thing the guild’s heart refused.
“Hand anything over to merchants who don’t know a damn thing but money?!”
“All those rotten bastards deserve from us is ditch water!”
An advance into Wales. For the guilds and merchant alliances active in the South, this was nothing less than the great undertaking they had yearned for. Wales was a land where—if the rumors were to be believed—rich natural resources and abundant food lay everywhere, and which boasted a considerable population. The only problem was that its closed nature had kept both the Guild Association and the Merchant Alliance from ever putting down roots.
So Simon decided to trust this provocation—no, this gamble of a dispatch—and invest. If it succeeded, the payoff would be enormous.
“Might as well stake my life on it. Why not!”
Simon resolved to gamble with his own life. The other officers’ opposition was no small thing, but this somehow looked like a venture that would work. Carrying that great resolve, he hired a host of mercenaries and laborers and set out for Wales...
Only to be met with this.
“I’ve cleaned up about thirty percent. The other seventy... honestly, I still don’t know what to do with them, so come up with some ideas.”
“...???”
...Did they even need him?
He knew that man—that knight—was strong. But that a single person could pacify Wales, a great noble power, was something he had never even imagined. Who, after all, would believe one individual could take on a great noble faction? Simon felt as if he were dreaming.
“Great nobles, my ass. No direct line of the house, no elite knight order—what kind of great nobles are those? They’re just cats with tiger skins thrown over them. What’s so hard about cleaning up trash like this?”
“......”
“You know the Scarlet Eagles, right? I ran into them a few days ago, and they’re a different class from before. They’ve even learned Air Walk now, which already makes them trickier to deal with—and they’re fierce. Viciously fierce. If Mordred’s elite knight order were on that level, I couldn’t have done it this way either.”
“...An example is one thing, but did you have to use a knight order that ranks among the top five in the Royal Capital?”
“......”
The man said he had subdued them easily because there were no elites. Even granting him that, Wales’s power was by no means weak. They might be called branch families and vassal houses, but they were unmistakably the people who had upheld Mordred for a long time, and the strength they possessed was anything but light.
Which meant...
“This man. I’ll have to raise his combat grade to eight. No—to nine.”
The guild’s scale of martial force ran from grade one to grade twelve. For reference, grades five and six were measures attached only to the knight-captains of great houses, or to Champions. But grade nine, several steps above even that...
A grade hung on legendary heroes and monsters.
...In effect, it meant he wasn’t human. Simon had no choice but to swallow dry. This knight, with whom he had come to be tied, might one day become a far more enormous man than Simon had ever imagined.
And so...
“Buying at the very bottom. That’s what they call investment, isn’t it.”
Once again, Simon resolved to invest everything he had. He had the gut feeling that putting his stake on this man might return, in the future, tens of times over—no, hundreds. An investment whose scale he couldn’t yet see the end of.
And the present.
“...Am I actually going to die like this?”
A full week had passed since the unification war ended. Across that entire week Simon had slept a grand total of four hours, and he was one step short of losing his mind.
Which was only natural.
“Lord Simon, ‘that’ has appeared again!”
“...Again?”
“Yes! This time they say there are fully ten witnesses.”
“......Fuck.”
Simon clutched his head. Investment, my ass. He should have just stuck to the work he already had...!!
And now a ghost? Damn it!!
Simon was coming to understand, in his own flesh, why dealers lived with curses in their mouths the moment a ghost turned up on a property.