I'm Not a Knight-Errant. Not Even a Knight (1)
Recently—if one bothered to count the days exactly—demons had been seething across the whole of the kingdom for the past three months.
They had appeared out of nowhere. People could only wonder what sort of madness this was, but the older generation, who had lived through demons once already, merely nodded at the outbreak with a relative calm, as if the thing were only natural.
"...Those creatures are the same as cockroaches or sewer rats. Let a place grow filthy, leave rotten meat lying about here and there, and sooner or later they show themselves."
Demons, as a rule, are born the more despair flowers in human feeling, and the more thickly death settles over the land, the livelier they become, hunting for the spark of life. It was a nature worthy of things that belonged to Hell, and one reason their appearance in the present age was no surprise at all.
"Let one of them show itself, and the rest will keep coming. Eh? How did our generation wipe out every last demon, you ask? Haha! What a strange thing to say. When, I ask you, did we ever wipe them out?"
A soldier who had survived from that older generation shook his head and denied it. They had not driven the demons out and carried peace back into the world.
"Once peace takes root, demons vanish on their own. What you need, as the saying goes, is an age of great peace."
When the war ended, the demons too would disappear of themselves. It was advice that was not quite advice, and the people could only sigh.
"And how is peace supposed to get here...?"
An age of war. In times like these, nothing could be more foolish than crying out for peace.
Even so.
"The Turtle Knights are here!"
"W-we're saved..."
Foolish or not, in every age there are at least a few who try to do what is decent.
"Not the Turtle Knights. The Turtle Alliance Knights..."
"Drop it. We get confused and say Turtle Knights more often ourselves, don't we?"
"That's true enough."
"But we're not knights, are we? No king or noble ever formally commissioned us."
"You want a commission from that king?"
"...Not really."
At a comrade's rebuke—don't say something so horrible—the other man nodded along.
The Turtle Alliance Knights. They had been founded barely half a year ago, and already they were famous: an allied order that counted outstanding knights among its number, and mages rare as anything under heaven, raised on the patronage of high nobles. Their chief duty had been to seek out lords who started territorial wars by unlawful means, crack down on them, or deliver a blunt warning.
One might well ask how anyone was meant to police a lord as arrogant as a king inside the lands he ruled. Fortunately, they possessed the finest means of conversation in the world. Namely—
Crack!
Thwack!
—violence, a thoroughly reasonable and even gentle medium of dialogue.
The knights of the Alliance swung their spears at the lord's men as they charged.
Crunch!
The spears that stabbed in faster than a blink had neither edge nor point. A blunt lump of iron rode each shaft, and a spear like that punched through a soldier's sword and, in the same motion, clubbed his skull. The lord had more troops ready to resist, but the instant the mages' lightning fell, that was the end.
They were too strong.
...No. Those others were too weak.
"Why are these guys this bad?"
"Were we always this strong?"
"We're not the strong ones. They're weak. Part of it is that the man who taught us spoiled our eye for these things."
"...Ah. Got it in one."
Men in bearskins. The members of the One Hundred and Eight Arhats accepted it readily enough. Well, the man who had taught them had been absurdly formidable. To a ridiculous degree...
They had come to understand it only recently, out in the world: not every knight alive was strong, and some were outright worse than freshmen at the Academy. They had learned nothing but Fighting Art. Body and technique, in far too many of them, were hopelessly frail. The Arhats, by contrast, had fundamentals set like stone, and their vision was broad. They had received only a year of teaching, yet lately they kept thinking that what they had taken from that single year might be richer than ten years of anyone else's.
Then—
Waaaaah...!!!
The commoners broke into cheers as they watched the lord and his men being brought to justice.
"Waaaah! They're taking the lord away!"
"My father should have lived to see this."
"Hang that lord from the guillotine!"
In an ordinary domain the people might have found it in themselves to pity their lord, but not one soul showed him a scrap of sympathy. And no wonder. The lord now being punished had dragooned young men into soldiers by forced conscription, and had not paid so much as a wage to those he dragged away. Nor was that all. He had raised the taxes, seized even their food, and meant to starve them to death. To the commoners he looked a more hideous demon than anything that had climbed out of Hell, and they could not muster even a trace of bitter affection for him. If they could have had their way, they would have burned him at the stake.
The One Hundred and Eight Arhats sympathized well enough with that feeling, but permission, they thought, probably had to come first.
"Alliance Lord. What will you do?"
"......"
"Alliance Lord?"
"...Not Alliance Lord. Chairwoman, Conrad."
"Ah, I call you that so often it just slips out.... Still, Alliance Lord doesn't sound so bad, does it?"
"The feeling is different. Haa..."
The girl whose eyes were hidden behind a blindfold let out a sigh. It felt thoroughly strange that people kept calling her Alliance Lord rather than Chairwoman. But a title could be corrected later. What mattered now—
"We can't punish the lord on our own say-so. We profess neutrality, and nothing past that."
"For neutrals, haven't we stuck our noses in rather far? We even punished the lord..."
"This one couldn't be helped. Demons were a breath away from being summoned."
"......"
"I mean it."
"I believe you. Whose word would I dare doubt? Saint—no. Alliance Lord."
"...You're doing that on purpose, aren't you?"
The girl pouted, lips pushed out in a sulk, and they laughed. It was not that they meant to slight her. They were only showing, in their own fashion, their respect for a noble lady who had risen high and still had not changed.
Then—
"Speaking of which, have you heard the rumor, Alliance Lord?"
"...A rumor?"
"The knight-errant who's been hunting demons of late."
"......"
"From what I hear, no matter how alien the demon, no matter how strong, that knight destroys it with overwhelming monstrous strength."
"...They say one punch blew five buildings away."
"There's a rumor he folded a giant demon the size of a mountain clean in half. Or tore it apart."
"Then it's certain. Only one person could do a thing like that."
"Right."
"...He hasn't changed at all. Truly."
The girl smiled in the end. A rumor she had been hearing for nearly a month. Some called it exaggeration. Others called it an empty tale, a story minstrels had invented to make money. But the girl—no, they—knew. They knew who the knight was who could fold up a demon that even they, gathered together, found fearful and difficult to face, or crush it to powder the way one crushes a biscuit underfoot.
They had parted only half a year ago, yet she smiled quietly, calling up the man she missed in every moment, as if even a rumor were enough to make her glad.
Rumors spread.
However small a rumor may be, if it runs on for a week, passes a fortnight, and then spills without end through a whole month, it ceases to be a rumor at all. It becomes a rumor infinitely close to the truth. And so a few people in the Royal Capital, hearing it, could not help a snort of laughter.
"A knight-errant. An ancient relic has shown itself again."
The black-eyed young noble shook his head.
"Are knight-errants really such peculiar beings? Aren't there plenty of wandering knights and the like?"
The gray-haired boy asked it in return, and the black-eyed one—well, the fellow people roughly called Blackie—objected.
"Not the same thing at all. A wandering knight is, so to speak, a mercenary. A drifter who happens to be holding the rank of knight. A knight-errant is different. He wanders the world the same way, but he is one who follows chivalry."
"I see. ...But hearing it put like that, a culture of knight-errants ought to flourish in Pendragon, where chivalry is prized. Why call it an ancient relic?"
"Because of the questing knights who, in the name of helping others, did nothing but make nuisances of themselves and led commoners into misery."
"??"
The gray-haired one, bearer of the offhand nickname Taechang, tilted his head.
"As you say, plenty of people admire the old knightly romances and call themselves knight-errants. But most of them committed all manner of excesses just to raise their own fame. Among them were many whose meddling was worse than doing nothing at all, and from the commoners' side there had never been a nuisance quite like it."
"...I get the general feel of it."
"Just so."
This was the passage that explained why the knight-errant had vanished. They knew nothing of chivalry and caused nothing but accidents while chasing their own fame, so the disappearance of that name was a natural current.
"Afterward, people might still call a wanderer a wandering knight, or a questing knight. They do not call him a knight-errant."
"Then what about this time?"
"The Instructor would never call himself a knight-errant. The commoners must be the ones giving him the name."
"...That's something. If it's the commoners calling him that."
"Because he's the Instructor."
The two boys laughed—the first time in half a year. They were only hearing a rumor, and still he was the same as ever.
He really does go through life in high spirits.
Lately they had had little to be cheerful about. After the kingdom had come to this, they had worked hard in their own way and lived diligently enough, but there was almost nothing to laugh at. In a sense it was the side effect of being forced into adulthood and suddenly becoming busy—of having to live inside reality. Honestly, it was a joyless business. So news of him felt like rain on a drought. Because he was still making them something to laugh about.
"...Now that I think of it, do you suppose that person has met the Instructor by now?"
"Who are you talking about?"
"You know. The one who vanished after leaving a single letter."
"...Ah. You mean him? Well, I couldn't say. He must have heard the rumor, at least."
Recalling him, the two boys felt awkward first, and then something closer to a sad little laugh. Truly...
"A pitiful figure, if ever there was one."
They turned a deep sympathy upon a certain wanderer. Even at this very moment, surely—
"He's walking a road of penance."
Tramp, tramp!
A man was climbing the mountain. Vulcan. It had taken him more than two full months just to get this far.
"Damn it. Goddammit..."
Stubble patched his face, and his hair was nothing short of a wild tangle. He looked as filthy as a man who had not washed in days. But he had not even had the time to wash properly. How many bands of bandits had he met between the Royal Capital and Vulcan, and he had collided with packs of goblins and fought battles that dragged on for dozens of days. He had grown enormously in the struggle just to stay alive, but the man was not glad of it in the least. He only wished this damned penance would end, even a single day sooner.
Then—
"Oh! You, you!! You know my face! You do know it!"
A honeybee the size of a puppy nodded. Then it asked with a tilt of its body.
Why are you here?
That was the giant honeybee's question, and the man, quick enough to catch it, felt the nausea rise first.
"Why am I here!? I came looking for that damned man! Where is he—where is that irresponsible bastard!!"
The man shouted as if he were howling, as if he were pouring out every bitterness of the road, and as if he were rejoicing that the end had finally drawn near.
......However.
The honeybee shook its head as if to say what a shame, and pointed off beyond the mountain. A slow-witted person might not have understood, but the man was considerably quick on the uptake. Perhaps that was why.
"...He—he left...?"
"Wh-when?"
"A—a month ago?"
"......"
Pat, pat. The honeybee comforted him. An unfamiliar face would have been one thing, but this was a human it knew, at least a little. If a man wore a look as though the whole world had collapsed, a bit of comfort was the least one could offer. Obviously!
After that the honeybee flew off to hunt again—a honeybee beginning another vigorous day of gathering honey, if only for the sake of the newly born young.
"......"
Left standing alone, the man only wore a blank, stunned expression. And then—
"D-damn it! Goddammit! This filthy world...!!"
He thrashed as if he had gone mad, swinging the hammer that was by now no different from his own body, rampaging without restraint.
Lately there was a questing knight who went about felling bands of bandits and monsters with a single hammer, and his fame was on the rise. Unusually, he chased neither honor nor renown, and seeing that questing knight, people had begun to call him this:
The boy who chased a certain knight so that the man would resign, and who, without ever meaning to, was coming to be called a knight-errant just as his master was, kept throwing his tantrum. Being driven off by Vulcan ten minutes later was only the natural next step.
The bees covered the baby honeybees' eyes and told them not to look at that.
...It was bad for their emotional education.