The Knight Wore a Suit (2)
Those who had set foot on the so-called central avenue of the Royal Capital were forever insisting that the place was another world.
Laborers who had gone in for the construction work were the worst of them, claiming that even the air was different there. People who overheard them in the taverns clicked their tongues and said a boast stops being any use the moment it gets too big.
But the laborers had cause to feel wronged.
"No, I'm telling you, it's real!"
"Even the air is different!"
"The whole street is made of marble, and every ornament is gold and jewels! And the water's free! No—there are channels laid all through the streets, and the water's so clean and cold you can drink it straight!"
"There are fruit trees everywhere. You can just pick whatever you like!"
They poured the testimony out with one voice, and the longer they talked, the colder the looks they received.
Well, of course. If you want to be believed, you have to say something a person can believe. Marble streets were already a maybe. Every ornament gold and jewels, and water so clear it cost nothing? Fine fruit trees strewn so thick you could pick and eat without a second thought?
What was this supposed to be?
"A boast is only a boast if you know when to stop. Ease up, will you?"
People tore into them. And the ones being torn into felt it was unfair. They had spoken nothing but the truth, and not a soul would believe them.
Shaaaa—
Clear water burst, cool and bright, from a vast fountain of marble. A mage laid a purification spell upon it every day, so the fountain always ran clear. What was truly astonishing, though, was that channels had been cut so the water spraying from that fountain could flow out through the streets.
Trickle.
Even the waterways running in every direction were clean. With hundreds of them, you would expect moss or filth in at least one, but an alchemist's hand had touched them as well, and impurity was not permitted. The clear water fed the fruit trees landscaped prettily along the avenue, and keepers stood constant watch so insects would not swarm the branches. Now and then they handed fruit to young lords and ladies who had been racing down the street and wanted to wet their throats, and every time, the children tossed cores and rubbish wherever they pleased.
But—
Other keepers waited ready to whisk even that away in a breath, so the street never had a chance to grow dirty.
Magic, alchemy, and keepers beyond counting hurried this way and that where noble eyes would never catch them. The central avenue was, in truth, another world.
A street so peaceful, so beautiful, so relentlessly clean.
The Upper District. No nickname could have fit more precisely, and there was no denying how precise it was. A knighthood alone would not get you in. You needed at least a barony. It was not merely that the property values were astronomical; rank, honor, and a dozen other conditions were weighed as well.
Children of great houses with three centuries of history or more, and of high officials. Merchants who possessed not only vast wealth but titles of their own. Diplomats from foreign realms. Only blood like that filled the street, and a commoner here was as good as a thing that did not exist.
The keepers? They, too, were bloodlines that had served a great house for three generations at least. In other words, scarcely different from quasi-nobles.
Extravagant. Excessive, and excessive again.
...Well, it wasn't strange. Even the world a certain knight remembered had preached equality, and still, like an unspoken law, where you lived changed with status and property, and people were sorted by class. In that sense, it was no oddity that a kingdom's capital should keep a district for the upper class alone. If anything, people took it as a matter of course.
And into a street like that—
Clatter. Clatter.
"Look over there."
"Hmm."
"That's Tristan."
"...Ha."
A carriage rolled in and drew sharp looks. It flew the red eagle banner of Tristan, and there was nothing strange about Tristan—a great house famed not only in the kingdom, but in the South—entering the central avenue. They had the standing for it.
Even so.
"It won't be His Lordship. So then..."
"That adopted daughter of his, I suppose. Ha! Absurd."
The nobles who lived in the central district offered their criticism without mercy. They knew. The current Marquis of Tristan had retired from society long ago, and was the sort of man to stay in the mansion prepared for him in the Royal Capital rather than come down a street like this. There was Vale Tristan of a branch line, true, but he was a man who poured himself into training, nowhere near the sort who belonged here.
Which left only one person who could ride a carriage reserved for the marquis's blood and set foot in their district.
Levi Jeanne d'Arc.
A woman who, ridiculous as it was, had caught Marquis Jenimia's eye and climbed. And the nobles did not find it funny.
"Caught His Lordship's eye by luck, and now she walks all the way here? Ha! Even swollen guts have a limit."
"A distasteful girl. Truly."
Nobles prize blood. In the South, it would not be too much to say they worship it. The reason? The southern continent is land through which Mystery flows. There were even cases where a person's worth was priced by the purity of their blood, and it was not rare for a house of low rank to be respected all the same, if its blood ran pure.
So even if she was Tristan's adopted daughter, the nobles would not acknowledge her. Call her a daughter all you like—she was a girl without a single drop of their blood in her, wasn't she? Those who lived in the Upper District weighed blood all the more strictly. They had been taught its importance from the moment they learned to speak. Unkind looks were inevitable.
"I can't stand it. Someone has to say something."
"Endure it, madam. Pick a quarrel with Tristan for nothing, and you're the one who loses."
"No. Even if authority presses down on me, how can I call myself a noble if I don't say what must be said? And my father was a general of the army. Even Tristan could not ignore my father's authority."
"Madam...!"
The women looked at her with eyes that said they were moved. Courage past all measure. They clapped as if to confirm that a general's daughter was no lie, their eyes gone moist, and passed her their silent cheers. The noblewoman advanced straight upon the carriage like a general returning in triumph, as if she meant to shame the girl thoroughly and drive her off this street at once.
If she wants her debutante, she ought to go prettily to the Royal Castle. What does she think this place is, setting her dirty feet here?
The Royal Castle, she might enter. This place, she might not. From the sculptures raised along this street to the trees themselves, all of it had been built on noble wealth alone, without a scrap of help from the royal house. So this was their street, and even royalty could not casually bring an outsider in. A base blood, least of all.
And so.
Clack.
"You—"
— — —
...Or rather, it would be more accurate to say she had been about to. Had been. Past tense.
"......"
"Something you wanted to say?"
"......"
"If not, move."
"......"
"?"
Swish, swish.
"...Why'd she go and faint in the middle of the street?"
"I—I wonder?"
The man waved a hand in front of her a few times, got nothing back, and tilted his head. Behind him, a girl only blinked, wearing the same question. What was wrong with her?
And then.
Thud!
The moment the man set his foot on the street, the nobles quietly looked down. He might have imagined it, but the ground seemed to shake.
Crack.
Ah.
"What is this? Why's the floor breaking?"
So he hadn't imagined it.
The instant he stepped on the marble, the ground heaved and split, and the nobles quietly turned their eyes aside. A noble's pride and obstinacy, self-respect and honor—weigh all of that, and the natural thing was to drive out this man, in whom one could feel not a scrap of refinement.
But.
Pop. Pop!
"M-Master, a button fell off again."
"They keep falling. I didn't get fat..."
"You didn't get fat. The problem is that the muscle did."
"......"
"Please cover the front. Y-you're too seductive."
"...Bear-Girl, don't go saying things like that. I'll catch hell."
"???"
"......I'm losing my mind."
A person cannot, as a rule, raise their voice at a wild beast with no leash on it.
"...Ahem."
The street was silent.
Even the Upper District, if not exactly rowdy, was a human place where the sound of conversation could be heard. And yet it was nothing but quiet. That did not mean there were no people.
"......"
"........."
There were. Quite a few of them.
It was the season of banquets, so the upper street was crowded. Plenty had come out to shop or sit in the cafés, and plenty more had come simply to walk in the warm spring sun and the cool breeze. Horses and camels, birds and puppies. There were even those who had turned lions and eagles, kept as pets, loose upon the promenade. And still, it was quiet.
Dogs that usually snarled with no control over their tempers. Birds that sang as if they were performing.
"Uh... grrr..."
Even the lions, always the very picture of laziness, had in a rare moment risen and held themselves rigid. People, animals, beasts—every one of them held that tension. And the thing pouring discipline into the Upper District, like a rod laid across the ranks, was...
"Honestly. Clothes I'm not used to, I still can't stand them."
"Even so, you look wonderful, Master."
...a man strolling along as if he were out for a walk.
He had muscles fit to burst, but that in itself was nothing special. There was no shortage of knights who could boast still greater muscle, or greater height. Lionel's Black Lion was like that, and so was Mordred's War Hound, and people here had actually seen them. And yet, strangely, looking at this man left a stronger impression than either of those two.
No. It was intense.
Presence, perhaps. Atmosphere. An unknowable intensity that raked at the instinct to survive poured off him without mercy. If a lion or a tiger that had never had the wild bred out of it were loosed on the street, wouldn't it feel like this? Only because the other's shape was still the shape of a human did people not flee in a blind panic. Were it not for that, running would not have been strange at all.
"Master, your presence is less steady than usual. Did something happen?"
"Ah, nothing much. I put some spirit into it. This is the Upper District, right? Figured the first date might pick up a fight for no reason, so I tensed. That's all."
"F-first date— M-Master, really, you don't have to."
"For all you say, you don't look like you hate it."
"...Hehe."
The girl wore a happy smile, and the scene was pleasant enough to warm a person. From some point on, every gaze had gathered on the man, so the people watching were halfway to stealing a look—and still they stayed silent. They had been overwhelmed by the spirit he gave off. No. By his force.
He usually kept it leashed, but now he was pouring it out like a brave warrior charging an enemy line, and it was no mystery they had no room to endure it. That force belonged to a knight the princess had officially praised as sitting just beneath an Aura User. Not only ordinary people, but any ordinary knight would have struggled to bear it. The proof was that even a noble who had come up as a Champion had gone rigid. The more skill a person had, the more completely they understood how frightening the man's presence was.
"What kind of bastard is that..."
If a person's force could be given a shape, then the man's, right now, was nothing other than this.
A live volcano.
Something that might boil over at any moment. Touch it even a little, and it seemed ready to erupt. Horribly hot—and yet, so long as you did not touch it, it only breathed a well-behaved smoke. And that was exactly why it was frightening. For reasons they could not name...
Why does it feel like it's about to blow?
Because it seemed the flames might shoot up at any time.
And in the midst of that—
"But are you sure this is all right? I wanted to take you somewhere a bit grander. Or we could have gone straight to the banquet hall."
"Mm... I'm sorry I lied to the maids, but honestly, I don't want to go to a place like that. Being appraised makes me sick of it now."
"All right."
"Yes! I'd much rather go out with you like this, Master. More than anything, you taking me around like this means you trust me now, doesn't it? That makes me happier than anything."
"Don't be happy. The happier you are, the sorrier I feel."
"But I really am happy..."
"...And the more you are, the more I feel like trash."
"Hehe."
"Good grief."
What a fix. It was the mutter of a man whose head hurt, and watching him, the nobles blinked. More innocent than they had thought. More...
Gentlemanly?
Only the presence was like that. Otherwise he looked a little simple, a little earnest. A good deal of the talk was hard to follow, but the rest of it was fresh and young. They were starting to wonder whether they had misunderstood him, tilting their heads of their own accord, and even the pets seemed to be watching the young pair with warm encouragement, when—
"All right. Let's get started. We can't stand around like this forever."
"Th-then."
"I'll show you the example first. Your back... I'll leave it to you."
"...Yes!!"
The girl, looking happier than she ever had, nodded hard, and at that fresh sweetness people felt an embarrassed smile trying to form before they knew it.
Boom— in a single instant, the man's hand punched clean through the building. The wall shrieked and split.
!!!!
It happened in a moment, and people had no time even to cry out. They were just about to demand what in the world he thought he was doing, when—
Thud, thud, thud!
"????"
"Wh-what is that?"
...They had to be horrified all over again.
What the man dragged out by the hand was nothing other than—
"KAAAA!!!"
A monster. And—
"An—an orc!?"
An orc. A monster in the shape of a pig, one that ate not only people, but its own kind. Such a monster had come out all at once, and before the nobles' horror could even settle—!
Thud, thud, thud!
"Kaaaa!!!"
The outer wall collapsed, and dozens of orcs showed themselves. Every one of them bared a killing intent fit to freeze the blood, and the moment their identities were exposed they moved fast.
Crack!
"Not you lot. You're just muddying things."
...and fell as a group, their necks separated from their bodies.
Instant death.
"For crying out loud. I had the wrong ones from the start."
Fwap! The man shook out his hand. Lee Han wore a sheepish look. He had wanted to look impressive in front of his disciple, and it seemed he had already botched the opening.
And then.
"Hmm. This time I've got it, right?"
With a long, grinding rumble, Lee Han tore free a pillar that had been holding up the building with the broken wall.
And so—
"Ah. This one's accurate."
Whoosh!
He planted the pillar dead into the fountain, the way one might hurl a spear.
And so—
BOOOOM!!
Apocalypse broke over the street.