EP.82 — I Am Not a Knight-Errant. Not a Knight, Either (3)
Last autumn, a tragedy fell upon the South that no one living there could possibly have missed—brutal, and shocking.
The Grand Temple, the great seat of every believer who served the Light of Radiance, was reduced to ash.
But the horror of the affair did not lie only in the burning. There were the crimes of the high priests, and the records that proved them. There were the arrogant, sickening atrocities of the inquisitors. There were the commoners who stood up to testify to the temple's rot and put the priests to the flame.
Any one of those things, merely spoken aloud, would have been shock enough. What made it worse was that all of it had happened in a single night.
And even that was only the beginning. As time passed, the outrages the temple had committed came to light one after another, and the trust it had held did not merely collapse. It shattered.
Little by little, even the faithful of the Light of Radiance turned their backs. They went further still, despising the temple and loosing vicious condemnation and violence upon the priests. Those who had sinned were lashed to wooden stakes and stoned, and when the judgments cast every procedure aside, the soldiers chose to look the other way.
Was this the proof of it—that once people run wild, they are not easily stopped?
Priests who had neither fallen nor committed any crime began to suffer the stones, until at last, in the villages and cities of the South, it became a common thing to drive them out into the streets. For those who had been devout, who had labored to practice the mercy of the Light, it was nothing but injustice. But once a man is branded as the hated one, how he has lived hardly matters. What matters to people is venting their rage.
And so—
"I-it isn't my fault! Th-the temple and the priests are the bad ones! P-people said so!"
Drip. Drip.
If a tragedy was what followed, then a tragedy was only the natural next step.
Blood spread, soaking thick across the ground, as if to show the weight of the sin the other had committed. And the deeper everyone's sins grew, the thicker a certain laughter became.
There is always, it seems, one whose laughter only deepens.
Rattle!
The wheels rolled on hard, a low rumble brushing at the ear. Ask whether it was irritating, and the answer would be yes—but as if to prove that the set of a mind can make a virtue of anything, the knight took the sound of turning wheels for his soundtrack.
"...Huff. Huff!"
He was in the middle of a marathon.
"...Whoa."
"They say a knight isn't a man at all. A different breed entirely..."
"No—even so, can that really be right?"
The people could only gape. And well they might. They had watched him from morning until now, running without once letting up through an uphill march that had already stretched past six hours. That was why they gaped: not on flat ground, but along a road of unbroken climbs, and his speed never changed. Stamina even a donkey or a horse would have to yield a step to. Only the endurance of the camels said to roam the West could stand beside it.
"I'm gonna be a knight too!"
"Charge!"
"Waaah!"
The adults were busy being purely dumbstruck by the knight's stamina, but the children, their childish hearts stirred by a figure beyond all sense, took off after him. Tireless little bodies and all, they did not hesitate to show their longing for the knight—longing for the hero who had saved them from the bandits. For children, hiding none of it, and trying to imitate him, was only natural.
The problem was this.
"Heh... hehh..."
"M-maybe I can't be a knight after all?"
"Hiiing..."
The children looked ready to cry. Stamina that usually drove their parents to despair proved useless; they could not begin to match him. Even the child who swore he would lose to no one at running long distances had dropped out, and still the knight's face was unchanged from the start. He barely sweated. He only ran, silent.
"...If that isn't a superhuman, then what in the world is he?"
What left their mouths had passed admiration and arrived at something like appalled disbelief, and yet, in another sense, a deep respect showed through. If a person felt no respect for a man who, in all the days they had traveled together, had not skipped effort for a single one of them—then toward whom were they meant to feel it? Awe settled in their eyes.
And yet, for his part—
Refreshing.
What roused awe in everyone else was, to him, no more than a stroll to work the stiffness from his body. That this was the truth, none of them knew save the maid.
Five days had passed since he decided to travel with the merchant Giovanni, who somehow gave the impression that he would one day leave his name on history through banking and the patronage of the arts.
It was no long span, and yet a great deal had happened in it, and every time they dealt with whatever came, the column grew longer. A procession that at the start had not even numbered thirty had, before anyone quite noticed, passed a hundred and fifty. That alone was enough to show what five days could do.
"I never imagined the numbers would swell like this..."
"You saying that for me to hear?"
"How could that be! How would I ever dare, toward you, sir...!"
"It's a joke. You don't have to look so grave."
"...You have no talent for jokes whatsoever, sir."
"......"
The reason their company had grown was simple. It had happened much the same way as their meeting with Giovanni's party.
"Hand over everything you've got!"
"......?"
They had met bandits. Deserters, these ones, and what later came out through torture—no, through a counseling session—was that they were bastards who had committed crimes and then deserted. Their way of thinking was rotten, as expected. Lee Han trod them underfoot as lightly as you please, and once again saved people who had been a breath away from being sold.
The kingdom's law did, plainly, set down both a prohibition on slavery and a prohibition on human trafficking. But the more a nation falls into chaos, the more the law loses its force. Was this not the proof of it?
At any rate, dozens had been saved by crushing bandits in this fashion, and besides them he had picked up a few slash-and-burn farmers fleeing packs of monsters, and at some point the column numbered more than a hundred. Lee Han had never intended any of it, and could only be dumbfounded—but he could not bring himself to cast them off, and so he had decided to see them as far as the city that was their destination.
"I'm dumbfounded too. Five days, and this is how many people pile on."
"...It is because you are too generous, sir."
"Helping them once and then dumping them on the road sits wrong with me."
"In times like these, living while you still mind your conscience is not ordinary to begin with."
"You think so?"
"......"
Giovanni clicked his tongue inwardly at that unruffled air.
In a certain sense, he really is remarkable.
It was an age of war, a time when tragedy never stopped coming. The pitiful would be thick upon the ground, and if a man set out to save every last one of them, there would be no end. However pitiable they were, there was no duty that obliged anyone to save them, and no reason either.
And yet he meant to bear at least the minimum of responsibility. Because they were people he himself had saved, he was taking them as far as a place that was comparatively safe. Look only that far, and he was nothing but a good-natured fool.
But it isn't as if he hands his goodwill out fairly to everyone.
Two days prior or so, he had met bandits and swept them aside, and this time too he had saved people on the verge of being sold. Those he saved were grateful at first. Then, all at once—
"Is this all the food you're giving us?"
"M-my hometown first! I've got family I left behind, I tell you!"
The shamelessness of a man pulled from the river who then demands you answer for his whole life. Toward people of that sort, he had been this:
"I'll give you one minute."
"?"
"Get out of my sight."
"!!?"
"Fifty seconds left."
"U-um, th-that's, Sir Kni—"
"I'm not a knight, you moron."
"......"
He was cold, and he was firm. They went to their knees and begged forgiveness, but he did not give a second chance.
Finding it unexpected, Giovanni had asked.
"Is it really all right to drive them off like that?"
"If it bothers you, the caravan leader can help them."
"Haha, as if. I am a merchant myself. I have no mind to help anyone while taking a loss. It is only that I did not expect you, Sir Knight, to be quite so heartless..."
A question edged with a little curiosity, and the answer came like this.
"I've got a standard for helping people."
"A standard, you say?"
"Just my own personal standard."
"...Might I ask what that standard is?"
"Nothing special. I look at how earnest they are."
"...Earnest."
"Desperation works too. Look at this procession of ours. Every one of those people over there has a hometown. They've got families. And still they're following us without a fuss, and pulling their weight. Why do you think that is?"
"Would it not be that without you, Sir Knight, they fear being taken by bandits again, or meeting monsters?"
"Right. Meaning they don't complain because they want to live. Even though they've surely got things they want."
"......"
"And it isn't that they follow along nicely just because they're good people. They want to live, however they can. Even if it means turning back down the road for a while, there's something they mean to reach—so they swallow their pride, swallow whatever else, and follow me. Those bastards from before aren't desperate, so they pull that crap. They've gone less hungry. They've still got the leisure to look after their pride."
"Hearing it put that way, I suppose you are right."
"By my standard, at least, those bastards weren't desperate. Standing there stiff, chins in the air... Hiss. Should I go after them even now and fold them in half at the waist?"
"P-please restrain yourself."
That was when Giovanni understood.
Ah. This knight is no kindly man.
Only this.
A man whose own standard is set in stone.
Some would call it self-righteous. Giovanni knew that a standard like that mattered. To live while also minding everyone else's measure—
A human life is short.
For Giovanni, who lived a merchant's life, the knight's way of living showed him a great deal worth learning. It was not that the words themselves moved him so deeply. What impressed him was that the man lived by keeping a standard that was his alone.
Everyone knows a famous saying. Almost no one lives by it.
Perhaps, if he meant to grow into a merchant of the first rank, learning an attitude like that would matter. And so Giovanni had wanted to watch the man a little longer—no, for quite a long while.
But—
Clop.
"That the city we're headed for?"
"...Ah."
It seemed the hour their road together would end was drawing near.
Gloomily so.
Unlike the clumsy merchant, who could not hide a regret that felt like something in his chest giving way, Lee Han's face was odd. It was the look of a man taking a measure of something, and he tilted his head at the city.
...What is this?
Looking at the city ringed by a massive wall, Lee Han felt something subtly wrong. It was plainly a bustling place, and he could sense the breath of people living in it, and yet somehow—
Don't tell me more weird things are about to come crawling out of there.
The man who, over the past month, had picked up the nickname of demon hunter without ever meaning to, knitted his brow—without the least awareness that he had just stepped squarely on a cliché.