The Knight Wore a Black Octagonal Cap (1)
In truth, Lee Han had no need to accept that match.
Why?
Because there was nothing in it for him.
Take the offer, and he still came away with nothing. More than that—
What am I supposed to do with things that aren't even people yet?
Young masters, sprouts, chicks. To him the students were nothing but endlessly frail little animals, and they still had a long road ahead of them.
A few of them are better than your average knight, I'll grant that.
The barbarian, the scion of the Sword Duke's house, the Mercenary King's disciple. And our regressor, on top of the rest. Those ones sat on a different level entirely. Only those ones, though. The others were endlessly lacking. Push the comparison a little and it was an eagle beside a mouse.
Weaker than the assistant instructor. Are these even human pups?
Absurd as it was, once you set those four aside, the strongest of the lot was Damian Paulet—Lee Han's three-year assistant instructor. His slave. If the others were mice, that one at least amounted to a cat. True to the youngest son of a distinguished knightly house, his foundations were solid, and his Fighting Art was more than respectable. Even in the steel-cable jump rope Lee Han was drilling into them now, he kept showing steady results. Ridiculous, but if the four already named sat at the very top, Damian was upper tier at the least. His personality was a bristling mess, and that was the problem. At everything else, the bastard was gifted.
So, things being what they were, Lee Han had not the slightest desire to make them play at some proxy match. Send that lot out now and they'd only make a miserable showing of themselves.
…And yet.
"Instructor! We'll do it. The proxy match."
"What good are we if we run because we're scared of a few mages?"
"Spell-slingers daring to pick a fight? Ha! That's an insult to knights!"
"I'll bring you their heads."
"Send me. I'll have them pissing themselves at the mere sound of the sword faculty's name."
"……Little bastards."
Students or not, they were knight candidates through and through.
Right. A knight can't just sit there when spell-slingers come swinging.
They knew a thing or two.
These kids are growing up nicely.
Lee Han wiped the tickle from the bridge of his nose and hid how moved he was. He was learning, at last, what it felt like for a master to take pride in his students' growth.
Perhaps it was the force of that will. Lee Han found himself leaning, at least a little, toward accepting the bastard's proposal—but first he meant to hear what nonsense the man would spout.
Sure enough.
The winner of this proxy match shall, for the remainder of their career on the faculty, unconditionally obey the opponent's orders.
"…Did I read that right?"
"You did."
"Funny guy. Who even writes a condition this childish?"
Just as expected. The terms weren't merely a spectacle. They were filthy.
"Ha—just decide whether you're doing it or not!"
Even he seemed to know the condition was running wild. Something this crude. This was where the childishness showed, plain as day.
The face and the way he talks threw me off for nothing.
Mages were rare enough that a faculty simply didn't have many of them. That was the reality, and it was why someone that young could wear a professor's post at all. The chance he'd gotten it for his looks couldn't be dismissed either. Set aside the fact that he was a mage, and a face that looked eighty-two rather than twenty-eight, and everything else about him was half-baked. Short-sighted, for one, and unable to keep a temper like wildfire on a leash. Reach a more seasoned age and even that would improve….
No. A man like that only gets slyer.
He was this hot-headed while young. Let him grow old with the power and the strength to back it, and men of that sort turned vicious. The very kind you never wanted to deal with. For now, though, he was absurdly easy to handle.
"I refuse. There's nothing in this for me. Why should I take orders from some spell-slinger?"
"Ghk! Th-the other way around, then—I would be the one taking y-your…!"
"Your?"
"…your orders! Do you not understand how precious an opportunity this is!"
Odewal swapped his words in a hurry, as if he had no wish to be educated by a fist, but he was proud of himself all the same. And well he might be. It was a chance to give orders to a mage, and that such a chance was worth more than a fortune went without saying. From the bastard's side, too, the terms came of a clear sense of his own worth. He had surely agonized over them.
"…Just curious. What is it you want to order me to do, that you'd set terms like these?"
"Hmph. First I must rescue Lady Irene from your—ah, no—from your clutches."
"And then?"
"I will make you kneel!"
"…Go on."
"After that, naturally……. Ahem. Beyond that, nothing in particular."
"……."
…A novel sort of lunatic.
He was volunteering for a slave contract over nothing more than that? When Lee Han let the absurdity show, the man flared and shouted.
"For a mage's honor, as much as it takes!"
"…Well, I'll be."
A bad man, a ruined character, a bigot—and yet, strangely, all of it was half-baked. This was a professor of the magic faculty? A childishness so pure it swelled the chest.
And here I thought he'd at least ask me to introduce my backer. That was all?
Not even human experimentation. Just a handful of orders.
Honestly, a vow like that means nothing if you simply don't keep it….
It was a promise staked on each other's honor, but Lee Han had no honor he was obliged to keep in the first place. An oath sworn on a knight order's name was no different. What mattered to him was his own life, and the muscle he lived in dread of somehow wasting away.
"Fine. But don't break the promise."
"I swear it on a mage's honor!"
"Then I'll swear it on the name of Baltar Grace."
"…You would stake that man's name? Very well! That, I can trust."
Clap.
And so the sucker of a mage beamed as if his plan had already succeeded, never knowing there was a knight who held Baltar's name cheaper than dog food.
"—Some of you may have heard already. One month from now, you will face the mage students."
"What form will the match take?"
"A War Game."
"…The mages used their heads."
"Kunta. You don't know what that is?"
"To put it simply, it is a simulated war."
"?"
"Which is to say…."
A War Game. In origin it meant rolling dice, laying strategy, and moving pieces across an enlarged map to fight a war that wasn't real. By the present day the meaning had gone somewhat peculiar. Nobles, hungry for a sharper thrill, had reshaped it so they could enjoy a War Game inside an actual battlefield. Gacha—no. It had become a game of setting money on fire. Buy a forest, or one abandoned plain. Hire mercenaries, or soldiers gone to pasture. Let them wage the war however they pleased, while the nobles sat and watched. The idle auto-hunt phone games Lee Han had tried a few times in his past life—the nobles had built something far more vicious out of them, and paid for the privilege. Watching other people make war, and calling it entertainment. There was no vice quite like it.
"…Feels like they play with people."
Kunta's honest feeling. Arno nodded, as if he understood. Still—
"That aspect is not entirely absent. But the game is not only a negative thing."
"?"
"For those who live by the sword—knights, soldiers, mercenaries—it is rather profitable as well."
"Why?"
"It is an easy way to accumulate real combat experience, and to meet war, if only at a remove. And yet the risk of dying is extremely small."
"That is possible?"
"It is a rule the kingdom has set. To break it is to earn the royal family's displeasure, and fools willing to ignore that are rare."
"Ah…."
At last Kunta was convinced. If a proxy war with so little danger to one's life let a man taste battle and war at the same time, it was valuable beyond measure—all the more for a barbarian, to whom a struggle meant five out of every ten were always dead.
"For that reason, there are even specialists among the mercenaries who take nothing but War Game contracts. Isn't that so, mercenary?"
"Right. Pays well. Even in our trade, people fight each other over those jobs. Heh heh."
Becoming a noble's amusement was unpleasant, but in a mercenary trade where the work was already drying up, it was decent coin. The chance of dying, or of losing an arm or a leg, was low, which made it better still. With even Garand's word to back it, the sprout students who hadn't known much about War Games let out relieved breaths.
……However.
"Kunta has more he wants to know. Earlier Arno said the spell-slingers used their heads. What does that mean?"
"Ah, that? Simple. The ones with the highest win rate in a War Game are mages."
"…Huh?"
At the words that followed, every face went blank.
"What matters in war, in the end, is firepower. More than any one person's strength, a single destructive blow is more efficient, and it breaks the enemy faster. In that sense magic is overwhelming in a War Game. …Though for a knight on the instructor's level, even overwhelming firepower would be useless, I suspect."
Eyes slid, just a little, toward Lee Han. Certainly that man could smash a castle alone, siege or no siege, and have strength to spare. But to say the opposite—
"…So you're saying we're overwhelmingly at a disadvantage?"
"Th-that can't be…!"
"I-is this going to be all right?"
Unease spread through the room. The sprouts felt it worst of all, and the faces of the chick young ladies went grim. The young masters' group, at least, showed no open panic, but even they wore the look of a headache, never having imagined the match would be a War Game. They had watched such games since childhood, and they knew how tremendous a mage's firepower was. Tense as they were, they were still resolved not to lose. In the end, the ones who decided a battlefield were knights. However vast the firepower, it could not match a knight's breakthrough and spirit—and students though they were, they lived with the aim of becoming knights. So even in an unfavorable War Game, they were confident they could win….
—!!!?
This time, for real, a soundless cry of shock went through them, and every student looked at their instructor and arrived at the same thought.
……He's insane.
Whatever they thought, Lee Han meant it.
"You chose this."
They had said they would fight the spell-slingers. They had declared they could win. Then they would keep their word.
"Unfair? You haven't learned Fighting Art? Don't worry. There's still a month."
A month. It looked short, and it was a fairly long time. Some people dropped forty-four pounds in a month. Others trained for a month and ran a full marathon, all 26.2 miles of it. A month was time enough for a person to change—no, to be violently remade.
"Provided you listen to me."
The students couldn't see it, but from Lee Han's back pocket a single cap stuck out, asserting its presence with perfect confidence. A black octagonal cap. Nothing more than a featureless black octagonal cap—and yet, somehow, it gave off an ominous air.