Irene Windler Is a Villainess? (2)
They had met by chance—supposedly—but Lee Han was not so ill-bred that he could fail to show a little courtesy to a woman who had worked up the courage to approach him.
"Well. A chance meeting is a bond of its own. Walk with me, Chick No. 2."
"Couldn't you just call me by my name?"
"...What was your name again?"
"?!"
"I'm joking. Cadet Irene."
"I-Instructor, I honestly thought you'd forgotten for real, so it didn't sound like a joke."
"I'm not that much of a piece of trash."
"Hehe. I was joking too."
"You got me."
It was awkward at first, but the knight and the girl never ran out of things to say. They were next-door neighbors, after all. They saw each other's faces often enough that any real strangeness between them would have been absurd.
And yet, if a thread of awkwardness still hung between them—
"Talking like this at the academy does feel a little strange."
"We may be neighbors outside, but in here we're instructor and cadet."
"Right. That's true."
—it was probably nothing more than the tension that came of being instructor and student.
Irene Windler nodded along as if she agreed, though today, at least, she had the feeling they didn't need to mind the line between teacher and pupil. It was exam season. Every faculty had paused its lessons, and instructors, lecturers, and professors alike were keeping their hands off the cadets. Which was also why Irene had found the courage to approach him first.
Mm. E-even so, we don't look like a couple, do we?
A beginner in romance was unusually sensitive to other people's eyes. She worried they might look like some fresh, budding pair. And if they really did look that way—
Th-that would be a little embarrassing.
Irene Windler's cheeks flushed as red as balsam dye.
...Unfortunately for her.
"Oh, it's Lady Irene. Who's that beside her? A guard knight?"
"More like a mercenary, isn't he? Then again, this is Galahad. Of course she'd have an escort."
"Huh? Isn't that man an instructor in the sword faculty?"
"Ah! You're right. Did House Galahad ask him to guard her or something?"
"Maybe."
To everyone else, they did not look like lovers in the slightest.
How was one supposed to put it?
"Whoa. Seeing the two of them together is kind of..."
"The art styles don't match, right?"
"That's what I'm saying..."
One of them belonged in a pure romance comic. The other reeked of the end of the world. The cadets sent them odd looks, as if no pairing alive could have fit together worse.
Lee Han hadn't needed to come to the academy today in the first place. Through the two weeks of evaluations, most of the faculty either rested at home or cleared whatever work remained. It was closer to a preparation period than a holiday, and by rights the instructors ought to have been busy in their own way.
"Wh-why me?!"
In Lee Han's case, a screaming assistant instructor was sorting everything for him, so leisure spilled out of him in buckets. He had to admit it all over again: he had landed a fine slave. No—a fine assistant instructor.
And so, through this precious rest, he threw himself into training on the one hand and wandered the academy on the other, curious to see how his brats of disciples would actually turn out.
Duty? Or is this the fondness you get for people you can't stand? Whatever it was, three months of rubbing shoulders had made affection inevitable, and he wanted to see what the sword faculty could do. That was the shape of it.
Irene agreed, and the first place they headed was—
Thwack!
Thwack!
"Chick No. 7's doing pretty well."
"Lady Rose has incredible athletic sense, doesn't she?"
A tennis court like a battlefield of flowers. There, the chicks were putting on a show.
"It's a complete flower garden."
"The perfume's killing my nose."
"...Doesn't it feel like a man and a woman just swapped the lines they were supposed to say?"
"What?"
"......Am I the weird one?"
Most of the noble young ladies had chosen tennis for their sport, so the women outnumbered the men by a landslide. And the ones shining on the examination grounds were the sword faculty's chicks.
Thwack!!
"I-I won!"
"Waaaah!"
"Huh? It's the instructor!"
"Instructor, I won—!"
Perhaps it was because Lee Han had drilled them, and given them special lectures besides. The girls seized victory with overwhelming play and seemed to leave a good impression on the examiners.
Just what I'd expect from my members. No—from my chicks. About time the yellow down started coming off. Hmm. Even so, out here I could call them gamecocks, couldn't I?
Lee Han knew the species called noble young ladies. They wouldn't so much as walk for exercise, starved the flesh off their bones, and then bragged that being skin and bones counted as a diet. He also knew they kept a tea hour every day and steadily packed away cake, black tea, and sweets, all while claiming they managed their bodies with horseback riding and fasting. Bodies like that are how you fall apart.
So the young ladies seething after their losses to the chicks had no business seething just yet. Something more urgent came before indignation. Malnutrition, and a catastrophic lack of exercise. They might not feel it while they were young, but once age caught them they would probably ache for the rest of their lives. Next to them, our chicks are phoenixes.
Unlike those skeletal patients, the chicks overflowed with healthy vigor, laughing as they swung both arms with force. When he had first met them they had been no different from the patients he had just been thinking of, but they had grown a great deal.
"These brats. Making a man get all emotional."
"...What exactly are you getting emotional about?"
"The joy of watching a patient stand up healthy? Something like that."
"??"
...It was a sentiment still a little too far for Irene Windler to understand.
After that, Lee Han and Irene Windler took in all sorts of sights.
"Kunta's coming!"
"R-run! Don't let him hit you!"
"Aaaah!"
There was the barbarian rampaging across the football pitch like a bison, forever sending cadets flying.
"Move if you don't want to get hurt!"
"What kind of impossible trick riding is that?!"
"A mercenary, of all people...! Guh!"
There was the Mercenary King's disciple, flaunting horsemanship so mad that one had to wonder whether he came from the grasslands rather than a mercenary company, and making himself the tyrant of the polo field.
"I-I hit it out!"
"You crazy bastard!"
"As expected of the Sword Duke's heir!"
"...I fail to see what hitting a ball well has to do with being the Sword Duke's heir."
And there was the descendant of the Sword Duke's house, who in a dead-even match ripped off a walk-off, come-from-behind home run and became the hero of cricket.
Nor was it only them. Every last member of the sword faculty posted excellent marks. Utterly overwhelming. As the man who had taught them, he couldn't help lifting his shoulders. Was this the joy of showing someone a bonsai you had raised with care?
While Lee Han privately savored that swell of pride, Irene Windler looked unconvinced.
"Hmm. Those people are second- and third-year seniors, right?"
"They are."
It went without saying that among those sitting the exam were second- and third-years who had been skipping sword-faculty classes all along. Both Lee Han and Irene were surrounded by faces they had never seen, and Irene frowned at them.
"You said those people skip your classes and take private lessons from tutors, didn't you?"
"I did."
"...Then why are they so weak?"
"Hm?"
"No, they're far too weak. Next to their own classmates they look hopelessly short. Even the bear cubs could beat them."
"......"
"Wh-why are you looking at me like that?"
"You looked cute. That's all."
"Wha—?!"
"Hmm."
Not even realizing he had just knocked the girl's heart off its rhythm, Lee Han studied her as if he were seeing her anew.
Was it because she was a mage? Or because she had abandoned her actual post and all but lived in the sword faculty? Either way, the mage girl had grown a warrior's eye for the gap between fighters.
Or else—
Blood really is a tyrant, isn't it.
Perhaps the talent had simply been there from the start.
Her father's the duke who runs unrivaled with that Magic Sword. Even if they'd raised her as a warrior instead of a mage, she would have turned out well enough.
Lee Han prized effort, but he clicked his tongue and admitted that in a world like this, bloodline could not be ignored.
Irene's eye was accurate enough to draw that kind of admiration from him. Just as she had said, the second- and third-years were being overwhelmed by the first-years, and even a glance showed how wide the gap in skill had grown.
In game terms, newbies who haven't even finished their first class change? Set that beside the first-years, now teetering on the edge of a second or even a third advancement, and the gap was absurd.
...So this was why they kept saying the new knights get worse every year.
Looking at them brought it back. Before he came to the academy, the newcomers he had met—aside from Jord, the junior knight who had challenged him outright—had shown no spirit at all, like frightened sheep. Those sheep and these students were the same.
Their conditioning hasn't even come up properly. And the way they put out killing intent, or presence, is awkward. At best they've piled up experience hunting animals. Not monsters, either. The feeling that they had only ever hunted rabbits or foxes came through hard. The presence rising off their bodies was that tame.
Fundamentals. They don't have them.
To say it again: he had never once done an instructor's work halfway. He had met every one of them in earnest and trained them. And the single thing he had emphasized above all else was precisely this thing called fundamentals. To beat those fundamentals into body and mind, he had carved them in as if he were remaking their spirits.
Was this the result? The first-years had been under his teaching for less than three months, but if they fought the versions of themselves from three months ago, they would win overwhelmingly. And on the other side, the ones who had studied two years longer than the first-years—
A shame.
That was how Lee Han wanted to judge the second- and third-years. Hollow buns. That's what those are. Empty on the inside.
"Are fundamentals really that important?"
"For a mage, it's the same as calling yourself a mage when you can't even play cat's cradle with telekinesis."
"Wow. That really is serious."
Because he had used magic for the example, Irene understood at once. Being unable to play cat's cradle with telekinesis, the very medium of magic, was like a child holding a hammer. Nothing was more dangerous than being unable to control your own power.
"Why is their level that low?"
"War ruined people, in all sorts of ways."
"It did?"
"There's that, too."
The children wouldn't know. The leading parts in the Britannia War had belonged not to this generation's knights, but to the knights of the previous king's era. Those knights had all retired, and what remained were men who had spent the war doing nothing but feast and revel—and those men were the ones leading the army.
The Military God's absence is doing real damage.
The Military God. That is, Pendragon's previous king: the legendary monarch who had ruled the kingdom for a hundred and twenty years and raised it all the way to the standing of a great power. One might wonder how a human being could bear so arrogant a title as god, but looking only at the achievements he left behind, it was true they were beyond what a person ought to have been able to accomplish.
He was the sort of man who could have founded a country by himself.
Even Lee Han, who knew him only through records, had been made to marvel. The previous king's particular gift was none other than a talent for choosing people. Pick someone, and they were a famed general or a famed minister. That said it all. And so Pendragon, once filled with talent the Military God had chosen himself, had been feared even by the empire, and among the talents who stood for the Military God's eye was Baltar Grace in his younger days.
But more than seventeen years had passed since the king called the Military God departed for Avalon. The men of his own generation were already gone, and even the elders who had still been holding the line, after distinguishing themselves in the last war, were only waiting for the day they would leave to stand at the previous king's side. Now it fell to the young generation to lead the kingdom—and that so-called young generation was, well...
If it looks like war is coming later, I really should leave this country.
Watching the nobles who were meant to lead it, he felt a strange certainty that this kingdom had no such thing as a next.
"—So that's why it fell."
"Pardon?"
"...No. It's nothing."
"??"
He—Roen—swallowed what he had been about to say. It was not yet something he could mention to anyone. He could only keep it down inside.
Then—
"Was this what you wanted to show me, you impudent brat?"
"...Isn't one look worth more than a hundred words?"
"So it is. I'll grant that watching them makes the anger rise."
"......"
With that man at his back, pouring a frigid presence straight at him, a chill sank through Roen's gut.
He had thought he understood. Together with Pendragon and Lionel, the man was one of the pillars holding the kingdom up. Even so, he had believed he could stand tall even before a pillar. He had been sure there was no one left who could put a tightness in his chest.
But.
...He's frightening.
Roen was afraid of him. Of Blake Vivian de Galahad.
Was it the man himself who frightened him? Or else—
Is the lion's blood asleep inside me the thing that fears him?
Whichever it was, this was no moment to let his tension slip.
"Shall I cut him down, my lord?"
"Enough. I didn't come here to fight today."
"He is a man who insolently summoned his lord and sent him away. He should not be left alive."
"...I feel as if I raised not a knight, but a butcher."
"Give the command, and I will be a butcher."
"...Hah."
...Right. So that one was here, too.
Rak de Duron. Galahad's Last Sword.
That was not a name for the present. It was a title he would earn in the distant future, and he would also be the Slaughterer, the one who set every soul in the kingdom trembling with terror.
No one could have known, could they, that so vicious and dreadful a baleful star lay sleeping inside him. The only one who had ever set a collar on that star was the duke who possessed the Magic Sword. And in the kingdom after the duke vanished, there was no one who could restrain that vicious Demon Person.
But now is different. However vicious the hound, so long as it obeys its master, then the future in which it comes for us has simply not arrived.
So he meant to gamble. Here and now, while the duke still lived whole, and while the kingdom's worst slaughterer was still a loyal hound.
"...Your Grace. I came because I have a proposal for you."
"You insolent—!"
"Stop."
"......"
"Go on, brat."
"......"
To offer a proposal before the duke, and to do it with such insolence, was nothing less than laying one's life on the table. But the dice were already rolling, and Roen did not falter.
"You bastard—!!"
Rak drew his blade, and Roen, as if he had already predicted it, seized Jack.
"I'll hear your answer next time."
Whoosh!
...They vanished in an instant.
It was an astonishing gift for erasing one's presence, enough to slip even a high knight's senses—something close to a Mystery.
But Rak was confident he could chase them to the end and kill them even if his quarry had awakened to a Mystery, and in the instant he meant to move—
"Enough."
"...My lord?"
"Hmph. Little rats. They were like this before, too. Hiding is the only thing they're good at."
"......"
"...Even so."
The corner of Duke Blake's mouth slowly took on a smile.
Only—
"—it is an interesting proposal. That much is true."
His eyes, cold enough to sting, made it plain that his mood was anything but pleasant.
It was the fourth day of the exams.