Episode 1: My Story
From the moment the memories of my past life came back, my view of things widened and my thoughts ran deeper. I matured, in my own stubborn way, and after a long grind of effort I was lucky enough to become a Common Soldier in short order. The luck did not hold. War broke out almost as soon as I had the rank.
It was a war against a hostile nation that had never been on good terms with the kingdom, and it lasted three years—short, if you could call three years short. Of all the times for it to start, it had to be after I enlisted, and I was dragged in whether I wanted it or not, bitter the whole way through. I wanted to run so badly the want burned, but a deserter's life is a hard one, and I had no intention of living out my days as a wanted man. So I ground my teeth and went.
Three years of war, if that span could even be called short. Anyone who fought in it would tell you the same thing. It was not three years. It was thirty—fierce, and wretched enough to feel like a lifetime.
Fortunately, the winner of that wretched war was the side my kingdom stood on. We did not become an empire, but the victory was what lifted the kingdom into the ranks of the great powers. A kingdom's soldier, now a soldier of a great power? From what I heard, pay had roughly tripled, and veterans received a fair reduction in taxes besides. At that rate, nearly having an arm sliced off and a hole punched through my gut might almost count as extenuating circumstances.
Like hell.
If I had not possessed a troll's regeneration, I would have died dozens of times over and still had deaths to spare. For the first time, I felt something like gratitude toward the spell-slinger who had tortured me in the name of experiments when I was a child. War, I realized all over again, was a miserable bastard of a thing.
Anyway. I decided the only thing that mattered was that I had survived with my body intact, and I stopped caring whether the kingdom had become a great power or not. More than anything else—
I'm quitting because I'm sick of this filth!
Maybe it was because a raw recruit had been thrown straight into a war of insane difficulty, but civil service and everything attached to it turned my stomach. I meant to file my resignation at once, take nothing but the severance, and run an inn somewhere. The earnings might be thin, but I had a small hope that I could at least live with an easier mind.
Unfortunately, the world rarely lets a plan unfold the way it was written.
"Oh? Was that your doing?"
"Pardon?"
"You saved Her Highness the princess! Thank you. Truly, thank you. Heh heh!"
"...?"
Remnants of the enemy had struck the encampment without warning. I had only fought because there was nothing else to do, and somehow that had turned into a story in which I saved the kingdom's princess. Anyone who heard it would have cursed me and told me to at least make my lies sound plausible, and I was sick with the unfairness of having been made the hero of a tale that unbelievable. I had meant to keep my head down and live quietly. That same man had saved a princess? Where did nonsense like this even happen?
Reality, sadly, remained reality.
"I never imagined a talent like you was rotting away as a soldier."
Without warning, the man threw me a sword, and with it a necklace like a Silver Lion Dog Tag.
"From now on, you are a Knight."
"??"
I learned it later. The middle-aged man with the old-fashioned air was the captain of the knight order, and the captain had the authority to appoint knights at his own discretion. That was how I received a knight's rank without ever meaning to. Completely out of nowhere.
Is this even right?
"I can do it."
"I—I come from slaves."
"The kingdom pays no mind to origins, so long as there is ability."
"A-and the truth is, I also have a history with an assassin order..."
"Hoh. An unusual career, is it? All the better! Experienced men are welcome!"
"......"
I had hated the whole business so much that I had even come out as an assassin, and it had not worked on him at all. That was when I understood. This one was a madman in his own right.
...This is really some shit.
After that, I became a knight at the late-blooming age of twenty-seven. A knight dropped in from above, to be exact.
The others were sons of nobles, or else graduates of renowned academies. I was a commoner, and worse, a man who had been a soldier. For someone like that to wear a knight's name on the captain's favor, "dropped in from above" was the only honest description. And in any organization, a man dropped in from above meets the same welcome.
"Lowborn filth. Do you even know where you are...?!"
"Draw your sword. I'll send you where you belong."
"Walking out on your own two feet would be better for your health."
Ostracism. Exclusion. Harassment. By one means or another, you were made to suffer. That was the fate of a man dropped in with no patron behind him.
That knight-captain is worse than a cock!
What good was it, making me a knight? Forget backing. He just sat in the captain's office drinking black tea. If you put a man through this, the least you could do was watch his back. He did not even do that. My temper boiled over all at once. I had to bleed the stress off.
And so.
"You think I'm easy, too?!"
My eyes rolled straight back in my head, and the next instant my memory cut out as if I were dead drunk. When it returned, what lay before me were ten knights of the order, sprawled in pulped blood, and the captain who had put me down.
"Heh heh. A fascinating talent, as I thought. You don't appear to have had a proper master, and yet you know how to fight by instinct. A beast of a fellow, truly."
"...Stop toying with people and take my resignation. For the record, this isn't a request. It's a warning. Refuse, and I don't know what I'll do to you, mister."
"Oh? I'd very much like to see it. What manner of warning it will be."
"I warned you plainly."
By then I was sick of the captain and of everything else. I did not mean to kill him, but I wanted at least to knock his jaw loose. I put whatever came after out of my mind. Die one way or the other—it was all the same.
Except.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"W-wait a moment!"
"Heh heh. And when do I get to see this warning?"
"N-no, I made a bit of a mistake...!"
The old man was strong as fuck. I had not won the captaincy off him in some gamble. I learned it while being hit: he was captain simply because he was the strongest of the knights. He was not on the same level as the others. I was beaten the way they say a man is thrashed until dust rises on a rainy day—hit, and hit, and hit again. Right around the time I began to think I might actually die under his fists, the captain stopped swinging.
"Heheh. What a sturdy body you have. Look at this. I'm actually sweating."
"Y-you crazy bastard..."
"And the mouth still moves. A talent indeed!"
"I-I'm going to resign..."
"Enough of that. I won't accept it. If you truly wish to quit, defeat me. Then I will take your resignation."
"...Damn it."
I understood, past any doubt, that I had tangled with a freak who was absurd and monstrously strong. That day, for the first time, I even cried. Afterward, though, I did not shed tears. I sharpened the blade in my heart and swore an oath.
I will quit. No matter what, I will quit!
A gentleman's revenge is never late, even if it takes ten years.
...I can win, can't I?
A little of my confidence draining away was something I could not help.
From that day on, the men who tormented me disappeared. More precisely, most of them went sheet-white and ran the moment they saw my face. Fair enough. A few of the ones I had beaten were still being treated at the temple, and among those who recovered, some had been broken past recovery in the mind and retired. What else was there to say?
Did I beat them a little too hard?
Even so, it could not be helped. Who told them to get on my nerves? They were the ones who poked a man trying to live quietly. And so I was shut out of the knight order whether I liked it or not, and I kept my head down and did only my own work.
My goal, in the end, was to bring the old captain down. For that, I had to drive myself harder at the work of beating him, and I took up training—something I had scarcely done since my days in the assassin guild—without regard for day or night. Not that I knew much worth calling training.
"Isn't that the Kingdom Basic Sword Art?"
"I-I think it is?"
"...With that, can he beat the captain? An Aura User?"
"Impossible."
The only training I knew was the stealth and killing arts I had learned as an assassin. I could never beat the captain with those, and even if I did, I would not be satisfied. So I set my mind on a straight fight and began to train the sword—the only art I knew, the basic sword every citizen of the kingdom knew.
The higher sword arts taught by renowned knightly houses were a door closed to a man who knew nothing. It was not a choice. I did not even have an acquaintance who could teach me. The captain, I suspected, would have taught me willingly. I never asked. It would have felt like begging, and I had no desire whatsoever to become anything like that man's disciple.
Which was why.
"Hey. You. Spar with me."
"Wh-what did I even do wrong?!"
"Doesn't matter. Here I come."
"D-damn it!!"
Fortunately, I was in a knight order, thick with elites who had learned advanced swordsmanship. Several times a day I sparred with them, stealing their arts by eye and filling in what I lacked. I won most of those bouts on raw physical ability, but the order had its share of the genuine article, and against those I lost. The mistake was charging in with swordsmanship and nothing else. It was less humiliating than welcome. Men like that had plenty worth taking.
Days of biting down on spars and refusing to let go. Whenever I saw a measure of progress, I went at the captain again, without fail.
KRAAANG!
"You still aren't a match for me."
"Ghk—!!!"
I threw myself at him. It felt less like a challenge and more like the captain kindly watching a child show off, but I did not take it as humiliation. I only fed the venom in me—the certainty that I would win, no matter what. So I fought, and fought, and fought, and fought again, and in the end I achieved a perfect record. A hundred battles, and broken in every one of them.
"...You're barely human."
"Did you think Aura User was somebody's dog's name? Heheh. If it rankles, become an Aura User yourself."
"...I'm going to lose my mind."
Aura Users. Mortals who had become Superhumans while still wearing human flesh. Aura was a mysterious power, a realm you reached only after systematic, maddening training from childhood—and even then only by shoving aside every last soul called a genius and clawing your way to it by a hair. Continental common sense held that aura could be answered only with aura. An Aura User, then, was a monster in human shape.
And the man I had to defeat was one of only three genuine Aura Users in the kingdom. That was about the point where despair became the human response. I could not see a way to win.
Steel whispered free of a sheath.
"Ho. Coming at me again?"
"They say there's no tree that won't fall if you chop it ten times."
"I don't think that works on me."
"...Then I'll chop a thousand times. Ten thousand. Whatever."
"Now that sounds amusing."
Bang!
Three years later, I was still there.
"Haa. I really want to quit."
Still in the knight order.