The Knight Cheers the Youths On (1)
Winter had slipped away before anyone quite noticed, and it was the season when green leaves began, ever so softly, to pat the bare earth and show themselves.
Sunlight warm with the thick smell of spring, and a crisp wind with it, opened the Academy as surely as a key turning in a heavy lock and threw its thick doors wide.
Spring. The season that announced the start of a new term.
Just as they had the year before, a great host of freshmen—crammed with countless dreams and hopes, having survived the brutal entrance trials—set foot in the Royal Academy. Close on their heels came the students promoted to the second year or the third, and the freshmen could only gasp.
"Only two hundred third-years?!"
"The second-years don't even make five hundred..."
"They said so many were expelled or withdrew... It was true."
Nearly a thousand freshmen crossed the Academy's threshold each year, and only ten percent of them ever graduated. So they had heard—and so, it seemed, it truly was.
Was the pitiful thinness of those seniors' numbers not proof enough?
Fear, expectation, and confidence mingled in the new students' faces, each expression different from the next, but their purpose was the same.
Graduation!
For that, they meant to survive. No matter what.
Pendragon Royal Academy.
Graduate, and one's rise was all but guaranteed. Not only commoners, but nobles themselves strained every nerve within these walls. It was nothing less than a sanctuary of learning.
And also—
"...Do you think he's here?"
"They said he stands out. Ah—there!"
—a place almost absurdly convenient for building connections.
The students' eyes, especially those of the noble young lords and ladies, had fixed on a handful of people.
Was there not even talk that this was why more examinees had flocked here than in any year of the past decade, and why a full five hundred more students had enrolled than last year—to open a tie with those very people?
And as if to prove the talk had not arisen for nothing, the freshmen's eyes shone with a brightness that was uncomfortable to bear.
Black hair! That's him. It has to be him. Short of Lionel's heir, no one could throw off a presence like that!
...Lady Windler.
Is that Lady Jeanne d'Arc? The one from the rumors—the girl whose talent so astonished His Lordship the Marquis that he took her as his adopted daughter...
That's the Sword Duke's grandson... Huh. A barbarian! Mystery-races really exist!
Hmm. Where's the Mercenary King's disciple?
Blood first, they said, then the land you came from, and after that the school you shared.
The saying held in the South—no, across the continent—and among the freshmen there were more than enough who wanted, by any excuse of school ties, to forge a bond with those people.
Some had entered the Academy for that alone. Among them were plenty of children of the upper ranks, whose success was already assured.
One could call it vulgar. Still, they had passed every one of those difficult exams to enroll. Devotion like that was worth a little admiration, vulgarity and all.
In that spirit...
If it's the sword faculty, I ought to be able to get my face known, right?
Haa. To think I have to go to the sword faculty in person... But why do they attend so diligently? What is even in the sword faculty? My brother was clear—by the second year you take only the general lectures, and swordsmanship you obviously leave to the house knights...
Peculiar. Well. An unexpected piece of luck, for me.
The mere fact that those great figures were faithfully attending the Academy was, for the freshmen, luck. A blessing.
They had been certain that by the second or third year some of them would not show their faces at all—and yet here they all were, gathered in one place!
The first-years of the sword faculty dreamed, just like that, of a brilliant future.
A future of standing among those people.
......Of course.
"—As of today, I am in charge of the first-years. Damian, Assistant Instructor of the sword faculty."
"......?"
The trouble was that the way of the world is that things do not go according to plan.
"I don't like doing this from the first day either, but the instructor ordered it, so I'm only carrying it out. Don't resent me. Resent the instructor."
"??"
"Right. Exactly one hundred laps. First through thirtieth, you pass. Thirty-first through fiftieth, you're on hold. Everyone else gets demerits. Now run."
"Uh, um, what on earth..."
"Um?"
"......Yes?"
"Um?! To a senior—and an assistant instructor, at that?! You think this is your own bedroom?! Get the form of address right! Get out there!"
"......"
The sword-faculty first-year who had asked went white.
The second-year calling himself assistant instructor gave off a presence so fierce, so murderous, that his legs nearly buckled on the spot.
The other first-years were no different. Among those overwhelmed were young lords of knightly houses.
Da—Damian. Damian Paulet? The second son of the knightly house of Paulet?
Was that Damian this formidable? What is this presence...
A year or two between them at most, and still that presence crushed them flat.
Whether they were shocked or not, Damian Paulet did not care.
Rather—
"You have ten seconds. Anyone still not running after that will be treated as disobeying an order and given demerits on the spot. For reference, you should know that from three demerits on, expulsion is under consideration."
"......"
"Counting. One, two... eight!"
"What?!"
They wanted to object to how the count had jumped from two to eight, but the freshmen were already overwhelmed. They could not even muster the courage to protest, and broke into a run as they were.
One hundred and thirty sword-faculty freshmen.
The largest number since the faculty had been founded—and Damian was burning with the will to cut that monstrous figure down.
The more of them there are, the more insanely my work piles up. Damn it!
The instructor did nothing anyway. Damian, saddled with doing all of it in his place, found one hundred and thirty far too many.
And besides—
Half of these—no, seven-tenths or more—are trash. Trash!
An eye for people had been forced on him in a single year, and he could see that a great many strange ones were mixed in among them.
Spies, at a glance, or people raised by some faction.
Types like that would only muddy the water, and Damian had not the slightest desire to watch it happen.
He already had too much work. Wasting time on trash like that was a shame.
Cut them cleanly in half—sixty-five. No. Leave a neat sixty. Please.
Fewer than that would be even better.
Damian. Two years remained before he could be done with the life of an assistant instructor—a slave.
If it meant living those two years in peace...
Don't scatter ashes over my road, you worthless lot!
—he would gladly become a fiend!
Damian, the Hammer Knight, stroked the spare claw hammer hidden in his coat and glared at them without mercy.
"Hoh... The assistant found his calling, didn't he?"
Meanwhile Lee Han, watching the whole scene from a high hill, could not hold back his admiration.
The boy was wrecking them properly.
That skill of overwhelming them with presence and words, seizing the initiative and taking the flow for his own—and even the look in his eyes, calculating how a person might be made to suffer most.
It could only be inborn. What Lee Han himself had mastered only in his eighth year of army life, this one was doing far too naturally.
"Talent. Enormous talent. That one's born to it."
"Th-things like that count as being born with it?"
"Of course. Working people over isn't something just anyone can do. He's this good from the start, so from here on I can dump every first-year class and exam on him."
"......"
"What are you looking at me like that for?"
"...Nothing. I just think I know who brought Mr. Damian's talent into bloom."
"?"
"Maybe he's better at it because he learned by being ground down himself, body and all..."
"Ground? I ground him like a human being. That's all."
"......"
The gray-haired boy, Derek, was past speechless. He was appalled.
If that had been grinding someone like a human being...
Then how far could he go if he ground them like something else?
Derek could not find the courage to look into that abyss. He swallowed the rest and fell silent.
Sometimes there are truths one is better off not knowing.
To be clear, though, it was not mere bother that had made Lee Han leave the freshmen to the assistant.
Simply—
"Why are there so many weird ones?"
—because most of this year's first-years were swarming with sprouts that had already gone rotten.
Lee Han saw it at once.
The assistant seemed to think about seven-tenths of them were suspicious...
Take out about twenty, and there's nothing left but suspicious ones.
More than eight-tenths were strange.
He had been too busy of late to spare a thought for Academy affairs, so today was the first time he was even looking at the new students.
And yet, to think they had selected nothing but suspicious ones like this...
...What is that smell.
Quite a few of them smelled of blood.
Not quite criminals. Still, not people who belonged in a hall of learning. They belonged in a mercenary company, or an intelligence outfit.
Unpleasant sorts like that were scattered through the crowd, and the sight pinched his brow shut of its own accord.
What kind of person picked them?
He did not know by what standard they had been passed into the sword faculty, but he had not the slightest intention of taking in people who would obviously muddy the water.
Even less any desire to teach them.
Maybe I ought to turn the whole lot over.
The moment that cold look settled on Lee Han's face—
"Please restrain yourself, Instructor. This, too, happened because of your reputation."
"What reputation?"
"Didn't they say the footage of the battle at Mordred had spread? Of course that fame hasn't reached the wider world yet, but among nobles and merchant companies of any name, there won't be anyone who doesn't know yours. Those suspicious ones most likely came to watch you, or to win you over. So please don't be too angry. It's the sort of fate a famous man has to carry."
"...You mocking me right now?"
Lee Han closed his fist a little and looked at the brat. Geomdung—Roen—threw both arms up at once in surrender.
"Have mercy. These days, if I took a hit even in jest, my head would split."
"Quit whining."
"......I am not whining."
Roen answered with a straight face.
It was sincere. There was not a single joke in it.
As if to herald a new term steeped in the smell of spring, the freshmen's wails rose through the Sword Faculty Training Ground like an orchestra.
...For a very long time.