The Knight Cheers for the Young (8)
In a future no one else remembered, Roen had once gone so far as to marry a woman named Judia.
Had he married her for love?
He couldn't say. What he did know was that he had been driven into a corner then, and that something in him had been wrong. He had married her as if possessed.
Only afterward did he learn the truth. She had not merely made a fool of him. She had been an assassin of the temple, drawing near so she could drag his comrades down with him.
It was enough to set his teeth on edge and send the blood pounding in his skull. That she had twisted even his feelings already had the heat rising in him — and she was the woman who had destroyed his brothers-in-arms besides. He could not forget a grudge like that. It might not have happened yet, but once he knew that woman was a seed of evil, he could never simply let her pass. Rage was the only thing left to burn with…
“Geomdung, you really are loaded. Never would've guessed this building was yours.”
“……”
He was simply blank. For this one moment, not a word would come, and even the anger had slipped his mind.
What was that?
“Hey, don't get too mad. I don't know why, but I get that you've got a serious grudge against that one. She's working right now, though.”
“……”
“Could you react a little? Talking to myself is embarrassing.”
“…Instructor.”
“There we go.”
“……”
“…Silent again, you bastard.”
The grumbling alone was unmistakably the instructor he knew. And yet—
“A-are you really the instructor?”
That shape was something he could not imagine belonging to the man.
A handsome young man stood there. Roen was not in the habit of calling people handsome, but this one was handsome to a startling degree. The air around him was bright and clean besides, with a charm that put a person strangely at ease. Catching himself praising another man's looks so extravagantly, Roen was at a loss. Since when had he cared about faces?
So this is what it takes for even me to be impressed.
He had never much cared what anyone looked like, and still the sight stirred admiration and curiosity in him. He could only stand there, dumbfounded.
“D-did you perhaps use a transformation artifact?”
Jack, seeing him stare, asked in his place. The young man turned the question back on him.
“There's an artifact like that?”
“I-I've never heard of one either. Looking at you now, though, it seemed like there might be…”
“I'd love a convenient artifact like that. But no. I didn't use one. I just compressed the muscle and bone.”
“?”
“You saw it earlier. Like this.”
Crack!
“You compress the body. Stick with it and you'll manage it too. I taught you how to use your body, didn't I? Same idea.”
“……”
“Answer me, brats. Feels like I'm talking to myself.”
“……”
Wouldn't an answer have been the stranger thing?
An arm swelled without warning, and a piece of the instructor they knew surfaced out of it. Seeing that only left them more dazed. Faced with a trick more astonishing than any circus, the mind simply could not keep up. No — a circus would not even bear the comparison.
“B-but, Instructor.”
“Hm?”
“I-if all you did was compress your body, does that mean you originally looked like that?”
“Ah, this face? It's more or less how I looked when I was younger. Seven years ago, at least, I was a soft little bookworm too. Once I started training properly, I got out of that scrawny look.”
“……”
“Why have you been reacting like that?”
“…I'm just speechless. In a number of ways.”
“??”
“Haha…”
Jack spoke for him again, putting the feeling into words, and Roen found that he had even forgotten his grudge against Judia Pierre for a moment. He shook his head.
This man, honestly—
“…You're always cut from a different cloth.”
A man forever from another genre. He had thought there was nothing left that could surprise him, and still his master kept manufacturing fresh astonishments until a hollow laugh escaped him. An absurdity so complete it snuffed out even a blazing grudge in an instant.
News that a social gathering was opening in the Royal Capital for the first time in nearly five years was, to the papers, a buffet fit to burst the belly. Chase the incidents and rumors of high society and the copy never ran dry. Nobles bought the papers, and so did everyone who yearned after the glitter of the upper ranks, which made the whole affair a festival from a publisher's point of view. And of all that copy, the story that sold best was, without question—
“‘Who will be the flower of the capital's high society, opening for the first time in six years?’ Ha! Lady Windler, obviously. They say her looks rival a fairy's.”
“Come now. Everyone knows rumors swell. A fairy, of all things!”
“You think so?”
“Lady Levi Jeanne d'Arc. I saw her at the War Game the other day, and she was spirited and lovely both. My money's on her raising a storm in society this season.”
“There's the young lady of House Guinevere, isn't there? On intellect alone they say she's as good as a young sage. Beauty, past a certain point, is all the same. What actually matters, if you ask me, is whether the person is wise.”
“Oh, piss off and drop dead!”
Who, in the end, would be chosen the most beautiful young lady of this debutante? That was the story that sold. Some called it lewd and said so loudly, but beauty stirred human wanting whether one liked it or not, and arguing over it as if it were a debate made for a pleasantly absorbing topic. This was the first debutante the Royal Capital had held in six years, and young ladies were gathering from every corner of the South, so the question pulled even harder. The ones drawing the greatest notice were, inevitably, the women who had already seized attention the year before.
Irene Windler, the mage with a fairy's beauty. Levi Jeanne d'Arc, the swordswoman, pitiable and yet possessed of a knight's nobility. Karin Allensia de Guinevere, the young scholar whose eyes were already said to hold a sage's brilliance. Curiously enough, every one of them was a girl enrolled at the Academy.
Plenty of other noblewomen were being watched, of course, but none had shown talent or deeds to match those three. The women once called the flowers of high society had each been known for extraordinary gifts as well as looks, so in a sense it was only natural that notice should gather on the girls named above.
Lately, though, another flower had been climbing fast enough to threaten their hold. For nearly ten days she had shown her face at tea parties and banquets great and small, and those ten days alone had been enough to steal the souls out of people. A woman of uncommon charm.
Her name—
“Is that Judia Pierre de Loengrin?”
“The Count of Loengrin had a daughter? First I've heard of it.”
“Beautiful. Beautiful…”
“Hasn't the talk around Loengrin been bad lately, though?”
“Hmm. What are they thinking?”
Loengrin, a great house whose momentum had broken again and again, and which now lived under watch. The moment word spread that its hidden young lady had stepped into the world, every eye turned, and no one hesitated to marvel at her charm.
Well.
If this lie comes apart, that may be the day I meet the guillotine.
All of it was a lie.
Cold sweat trickled down her back. Judia Pierre, the false young lady wearing Loengrin's name, walked the floor and barely managed to hide it — a stage so narrow that one misstep left nothing beneath her but a pitch-black drop.
Whether she trembled or not, a conversation was underway on the terrace at the very top of the hall.
“You probably already know, but those cult bastards have started sniffing around again.”
Lee Han said it, and the answer came at once.
“I know. The Brass Knight Order. One of the three pillars of the Blood Cross Army, I'm told.”
“Figured.”
“I doubt anyone doesn't know that much. They know, and they still seem to be hiding themselves with some strange art.”
Roen's reply was indifferent. It was information he already had, and his interest was plainly fading. Lee Han scratched his cheek, looking as embarrassed as a man who had seen it coming.
“Should I not have said anything?”
“Not at all. I've learned a great deal, thanks to you.”
“Hm?”
“First, that you are hunting the Brass Knight Order as well, and that you still haven't found them. And that the one who asked you to find them is the temple — most likely Pope-King Raphael.”
“Wow.”
“You needn't be surprised. That loathsome bitch— no. The simple fact that you're going about with Judia Pierre is enough to tell. Seeing that bat— no. Seeing that dreadful creature carry on as she does, one can guess the rest well enough.”
“…That was you being as polite as you get, right?”
“In any case, you're working hard. It can't be easy, keeping company with that dreadful thing. What I don't understand is why that thing is using the name Loengrin. Did you have some arrangement with them?”
Loengrin. A great house of Pendragon, famous for generations of loyalty given not to the kingdom but to the temple. Of late, though, holy knights who had turned half-fiend had appeared, and word had gotten out that Erhin Loengrin, captain of the holy knight order in this generation, had tried to strike the Academy. The house was mired in scandal from every side. By rights it would not have been strange if they had been swept away entirely, and yet they had survived the recent catastrophe and were still stubbornly standing. The staying power of a great house was frightening, no question.
And now Judia Pierre, who was not even Loengrin's creature, had walked into high society under Loengrin's name. It raised the possibility of some compact with the house — a signal that a political bargain had changed hands—
“Nah. Nothing like that.”
“?”
“She's just using it however she wants. I felt like poking them.”
“……”
“What?”
“…It's nothing.”
You're probably the only man alive who prods a great house for a reason like that. Roen kept the thought to himself and murmured the name instead.
“…Are you suspecting Loengrin?”
He tried the answer that had sprung out of him, and Lee Han only smiled.
“See? Talk to a smart one and I get to save my breath. I like that.”
It was answer enough. And it was also this:
Loengrin… I may live to watch a great house fall in my own generation.
A signal that storm clouds had gathered over a house whose fortunes were already failing.
Fascinatingly so.