Episode 63 — A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (13)
"...A dream?"
From the barracks of Mordred, someone's vacant murmur rose, low and thin.
It had slipped from the youngest of the soldiers, still a little green. On any ordinary day the seniors would have snapped at him to get his head on straight.
"...An illusion, then?"
They were in no state to scold him. If anything, they were more dazed than he was. The sight spread before their eyes simply refused to be believed.
"R-reinforcements? They've actually come...?"
One reason Mordred had kept its world shut for the last three hundred years was the fear that the great demon might undo the seal and pass beyond it. Another was simpler, and worse. Whenever they tried to cooperate with anyone outside, something ill-omened followed. A domain they begged for aid would break out in plague without warning, or a war would flare between lands. The shapes of the misfortune varied. The misfortune did not.
Once or twice, a soul might call it chance. When the same thing happens dozens of times over, it is chance no longer. The decisive stroke had fallen five years ago, when they appealed to the royal house for help and war with Britannia broke out from a clear sky. Mordred learned the lesson all over again: they must never ask the outside for aid. Whether it was the great demon's curse or its scheme, the intent was plain. It meant to keep them isolated. So they lived without ever letting the words reinforcements or help from outside take root in their minds. They knew that hoping would change nothing. Even when a knight from beyond their borders first rode in to save them, all they had felt was distrust. They could not believe that outside help had truly come.
And yet.
"H-how many of them are there...?"
"Four hundred knights...?"
Elite knights sat their warhorses in plain view. Four hundred and forty in all. Not even five hundred. A man might sneer and ask what help so small a number could be—but a renowned order mounted on warhorses boasted fighters each worth a hundred ordinary men. And those gathered yonder were no mere renowned order.
"Knights of the great houses... they've come."
Knightly orders of the great noble houses: powers on Mordred's own scale, and in some lights leaping well past even Mordred. Not men worth a hundred. Men worth a thousand. They could be nothing else.
"The Silver Lions...?"
...Mind you, not every order on that field was worth a thousand. A few looked as though they might, on a generous day, barely manage ten. Even so, they were reinforcements, and no mistake. Nothing could have steadied the heart like the sight of them.
While the soldiers were still staring in disbelief, the knights in black plate broke from the formation as one. The ground thundered. Their black horses, nearly twice the bulk of the other warhorses, drove their hooves into the earth with everything they had. Friesians of the northern breed were said to be braver and finer than any other of their kind, tougher even than a fair number of monsters—and they proved the saying on the spot. Against hundreds of thousands of the things, the black horses did not slow their charge. They would not stop until their riders, their partners, had what they desired.
And the knights astride those Friesians—beasts already more temperamental and savage than most black horses—poured out an aura more ominous and more vast than the animals beneath them. In the next instant they had spears in hand. Spears so huge a man had to wonder whether they could even be swung.
The monster host charged. The black knights charged. Numbers were one thing, but the ant-like monsters boasted a mass and a driving weight that ought, by every sane reckoning, to have smashed horses and riders flat. People wanted to scream at them to stop.
There was no time to stop anyone. They had already collided.
The shock of the two hosts burst outward in a vast ring and swept the field.
"Ghh—!"
"This is insane—!"
The blow was so fierce a man could barely see in front of his own face, and Mordred's soldiers, already spent to the last of their strength, staggered and went over again and again beneath it. Even so they hauled themselves up in a panic and looked ahead with dread, terrified the reinforcements had been overwhelmed.
What met them, rendering that fear absurd, was flesh bursting through the air.
"Huh?"
Not the knights' flesh. What poured from the sky like rain was something else entirely.
"The m-monsters...?"
"...How many did they just kill?"
Monsters. A thousand of them at the least, torn into scraps of meat by a single clash and flung into the empty air. And as if even that failed to satisfy—
"Pick up the pace! You mean to be satisfied with a scrap like this?!"
With that bold shout from the man at their head, the knights in black plate drove forward all the more recklessly. They charged, and charged again, and broke through, piercing the monsters and smashing them apart—keen and unyielding as the snow-wind of the North.
Only then did the soldiers remember who these men were.
"...The strongest knight order in the North."
An order whose martial might was the longing of every knight on the continent, not merely within the kingdom. Against the countless hardy outland tribes of the North, against mystery-races, monsters, and giants, they had never yielded an inch. They had bent every one of those beings into submission and become objects of terror and of yearning alike: the warriors of Lionel.
The legends of the North were none other than these men.
"Ha..."
A tremor edged with awe escaped them aloud, unbidden. They had heard the legends until they were sick of hearing them, but this was the first time they had seen that order in the South—the first time they had confirmed the reality with their own two eyes. And so they dared to say it outright. That fame men called a legend—
"If anything, the stories were too small..."
Scaled down, if they had been anything. Never overblown. Even now, the order was being sold short. Their valor and their majesty were that fierce.
That ruinous.
In a blink they proved their name, and the monsters' numbers dwindled in real time—a sight that felt, for a moment, unreal.
Then more knights broke from the ranks.
Not the Black Iron Lions in their thick black plate, but an order in lightened armor washed with a blue-green sheen, riding horses with deep navy coats. Even at a glance the mounts were extraordinary, a presence fit to stand beside the black horses of the North. There was no mistake. These were mixed-bloods descended from fairy-horses—beasts that could walk and run even upon the water, and that followed only a house possessed of the Fairy's Blessing. And so far as anyone knew, there was only one knight order that could ride horses of that blood. For them to move meant only one thing.
Steel bit. Wet, and clean.
...It meant a festival of blood.
Unlike the black knights, who had burst the monsters apart in a roar, these knights moved in a swift and near-silent dance, and in a single breath they clove the monsters in two.
"Grrrrrrk—!"
Tens of thousands of monsters sensed their fellows' deaths and, like a tide rushing back in after the ebb, crashed over the blue-green knights all at once. It called to mind a wave no different from a tsunami. The blue-green knights regarded it without a flicker.
And then they became a gale.
A gale of blades.
The monsters surging in like a sea were taken apart where they stood. However violent a tsunami, the moment it meets a chaos of winds it simply comes undone—and so the monsters that met the blade-gale were minced without mercy and collapsed. If the lions of black iron vaunted a presence like rolling tanks, these men were grinders, plain and simple. Grinders with cold blades that pulverized falling rock and tidal wave alike.
"......"
A majesty so complete that even a hollow laugh would not come. And yet, in the same breath, they were forced to accept it. They knew who these men were. The order that Ganok—Mordred's pride, and its hero—had once named.
They watched the greatest river on the continent. They broke the monsters, the pirates, and the river-bandits that denned along its course, and went further still, slaughtering without mercy the countless invaders pressing in from the eastern and western continents—the foremost armed host of the South. Watchmen of the Lake, and the knight order chosen by Galahad.
"So those are the Turquoise Unicorns."
The foremost knight order of the South showed a might truly worthy of its fame and cut the monsters down at speed, as if they would not forgive themselves for falling a step behind the northerners.
And sure enough—
"Don't you dare lose to those damned water-striders! The North's pride won't stand for falling behind weaklings like that!"
"If you're slower than those ice-bugs, don't you even think of carrying the name Galahad anywhere! The shame of it—!!"
They were competing in earnest. Even though joining their strength would scarcely have been enough. Even though this was as good as a war. And yet no one could find fault with it.
"...Why are they that strong?"
Because they were strong. Too strong. They were slaughtering the monsters and grinding them apart so thoroughly that a complaint could not even leave the mouth—and so the complaints simply did not come. Two knight orders, one hundred and forty knights in all, fighting on even terms with six hundred thousand monsters was a sight the eyes themselves struggled to credit.
"So this is..."
The power of those called the strongest of the North, and the foremost of the South.
The murmur left someone's lips of its own accord, steeped in awe, and the rest nodded hard in agreement. It was a strength without a single flaw to pick at.
"...Ho ho. What a sight."
Ganok, past mere disbelief and into open wonder, could not keep from laughing. Even in the midst of a fight to the death against some hybrid he could not name as death knight or chimera, the laughter would not stop. The miracle unfolding now was that far beyond understanding.
Just what sort of magic did that young knight work?
Was the man a mage in truth? Ganok murmured the thought where no one could hear it—an admiration that would have landed as a grave insult, had the knight in question been listening. Perhaps that was why his mind had wandered.
Steel rang. The chimera knight exploded into monstrous strength and swung its spear as it was. Carelessness was death, and nothing else. Fallen though he was, the seasoned skill of a knight who had reached a considerable height in life, joined to a chimera granted the great demon's power, unleashed a force fit to shake the earth. One could feel, unbidden, the desire thrashing to kill the old knight and thereby be granted life again. A white ghost recoiled in horror.
"Captain!!"
The scream of a white ghost who judged his captain to be in danger.
But—
"—It's all right. It seems some rather dependable young men have come for us."
Steel screamed. Something parted, clean.
Ganok laughed, easy and warm, as if to prove his distraction had not been for nothing, and opened his mouth.
"Hoo. This old body of mine is worn out. Might I leave the rest to you?"
He looked at the towering man who had caught the spearblade bare-handed, right before his very nose, and at the spearman who had neatly taken the chimera's head, and he asked. Might he stand at his leisure?
To that question—
"A warrior still hale and hearty, and already groaning this much? Ahahaha!"
"Sir Ganok. Age has found you after all. In your younger days you would have cleared away trash like this in a moment."
The answers were insolence itself. Ganok did not take them as insolent. He only let out a broad, loose laugh. He disliked a slack sort of arrogance, but a brave and kindly insolence was welcome to him.
Steel rattled. Enraged at their comrade's death, the chimeras rushed as one upon the two interlopers who had burst into their fight. Did those two even know whom they dared to challenge? The chimera knights, the great demon's supreme masterworks, proud to stand equal even to the Bull of Heaven or to Ninshubur, came on just so—!
And in an instant the two knights brought them down.
Pathetically.
"...The young these days truly are something."
Watching, Ganok clicked his tongue. The young knight over there, slaughtering thirty thousand high-rank monsters, and these two young knights here, slaughtering chimeras...
Are youngsters like that common nowadays?
A merry misunderstanding, in which Ganok met the gap between generations in quite another sense.