The Knight Conducts an Interview (6)
The bastard moved fast.
So that's how he rose so quickly, young as he looks.
Servile he might be, but he carried himself upright, and when he bent, he bent clean. On any ordinary day Lee Han would likely have thought well of him. Others might have called it groveling; he would have called it a clever way to stay alive. Now, though, nothing resembling goodwill stirred in him at all. A bad first impression had a habit of lasting to the end, and the Lee Han of this moment was no exception.
If he'd been quick on the uptake, he never would have sent a thug after my kid.
A breath left him. Displeasure climbed with it, and a killing presence rose behind. He had taken an Immeasurable-grade elixir and still had a clumsy hand on the pressure of his own presence. Before men like these, he also felt no need to hold it back, and so he let it loose on purpose.
Crack. The glasses nearby, and the window, split with fractures. A baleful presence was a force all by itself. Glass, frail in the way of endurance, shrieked, and Simon and his secretary had to shriek louder still, if only on the inside.
Simon wanted, desperately, to flee his seat that very instant. He didn't dare. Run from this hand-axe monster now, and a hole would punch open somewhere in his body with a rush of wind. Simon was twenty-nine. He had no wish to take his leave of the world in the bright prime of his youth.
"D-do you know anything of the Marquisate of Tristan?"
He began spilling everything he knew.
"...Hmm. Can't say I do."
"It is an extremely famous house, though..."
A knight who didn't know House Tristan? Surely that was something of a problem.
"So. Is that a problem right now?"
"...Of course not. It's entirely possible you wouldn't know. Yes, sir."
Right. A man could fail to know!
House Tristan might be a founding-merit house, and one of only three marquisates left in the royal capital, but what did that matter? If this gentleman didn't know them, the fault was Tristan's. Obviously! Wearing the face of a perfect court schemer, Simon pressed on.
"Ahem. W-well. In any case, House Tristan is a great house. They cannot compare to Lionel or Galahad, but their scale is considerable, and they command a hundred knights. Aside from the Silver Lion Knight Order, almost nowhere keeps so many."
"A hundred..."
Knights varied from man to man, but taken one by one they were uncut gems that had already passed the sieve. Plenty of swordsmen learned the Fighting Art, yet among them, sometimes only one in thirty ever truly became a knight. Provincial nobles out in the country sometimes fell short of the mark, but the knight orders of great houses rooted in the royal capital were another caliber entirely—the elite of the elite. It was enough to think of each one as a match, alone, for several dozen seasoned soldiers. And they kept a hundred of those?
Knights whose keep cost as much as a warhorse: to maintain a hundred of them spoke to the house's wealth, and the fact that the royal palace tolerated their keeping a hundred spoke to just how high their authority stood.
"And the present head, His Lordship Marquis Jenimia, still has no child. The house is staring down a severed line, so Tristan has been moving day and night to see His Lordship married as soon as can be managed."
That the Marquisate of Tristan might fail to continue its blood implied a great deal. They were one of the elder houses of the royalist faction, and their ties to the royal family ran deep—a great power upholding the crown. If the head of such a power produced no heir, something like three-tenths of the strength of the nobles who supported the royal house would evaporate. For the royalists, that was a future they wanted absolutely no part of.
"If the marquis brat sits somewhere that important, why hasn't he gotten married and had a kid by now?"
"B-brat, you say..."
He is still His Lordship the Marquis.
"You're late."
"Ah—yes, sir!"
Ahem. As the man said, it was fair to wonder. Why had the master of a marquisate—noble blood, strength, and power all in his grasp—still not fathered a child?
The reason—!
"To demonstrate his loyalty to the kingdom, and the nobility of his character..."
"Spout bullshit and I'll start by cutting out your tongue."
"Loyalty, my ass! The men of House Tristan lose their function as men the moment they father a child. Their lust is castrated. And Marquis Jenimia is still famously full of vigor, a man known for wine and women. So he keeps many lovers, and no children."
"That's fucked. How old is he?"
"He turns fifty-three this year."
"..."
"Ahem."
Embarrassed even as he said it, Simon simply dropped his eyes.
And Lee Han—
"Old man's still running hot."
What rose in him was admiration more than scorn. That a man of that age was still so vigorous was genuinely impressive.
Except.
"So what's this Tristan, or whoever he is, got to do with my kid?"
The part that actually mattered still hadn't come out, and Lee Han pressed for it. There had been buildup enough. Time for the main course. He sent that warning, and Simon hesitated a moment.
"M-Marquis Jenimia sent a matchmaker to House Fault. He says the time has about come for him to marry..."
"...And to whom, exactly?"
"..."
"Tell me it isn't."
"Ahem."
"...Fuck?"
For the first time in a long while, Lee Han spat a thick, filthy curse. He didn't need the answer. He could already tell who the matchmaker had been sent after, and the absurdity of it struck him blank.
"I—I'll say it again. We are nothing but go-betweens. His Lordship wished for a meeting, and the guild merely laid the bridge. That is all. Yes, sir."
"And why, of all people, would he want a match like that from you?"
"You would be surprised how often we arrange matches for nobles. There are marriages made by engagement between house and house, of course. But you know how it is, don't you? Even nobles have their troubles. Do you imagine they have no lust? Engagements fall apart for all sorts of reasons no one may speak aloud, and it is common as dirt for an affair, or for violence, to leave someone unable to bear a child."
Nobles could not afford to show their cracks. When something unseemly occurred, they buried it without a trace and preferred to settle everything in secret. Even if the preparations cost a fortune, a good result made all things well.
"His Lordship is no different. The time has come for him to marry and secure an heir, and while he was searching for a suitable woman, he settled on Lady Levi Fault. Social face being what it is, the fact that he sent a matchmaker to a young lady that young must stay hidden. And the guild is doing everything in its power to see this marriage succeed."
"..."
"...From your position, Sir Knight, this may sit ill. But in the eyes of quite a few nobles, Lady Levi Fault is already a coveted piece of goods. Her looks are lovely, and young as she is, she shows a superb gift for the sword. For a knightly house, a child born of such a woman stands a strong chance of becoming an excellent heir. There are many who want her."
"Haaah."
Simon let out a long sigh, eyes gone hollow, as if he had aged several years. He had just laid bare not only the guild's blemish, but the flaw of a great noble as well.
Someone might ask what flaw there was in a mere marriage. That was knowing one thing and missing the second. It could paint the image of a house using power to force a marriage, and they might be pointed at as a house that did not even understand honor. If this information ever reached the world, censure would be impossible to avoid, and nobles who held honor and authority as dear as life itself would do anything to stop it.
Well. They can't handle that monster by force, so they'll try to coax him some other way.
A treasure in the hands of the weak was a misfortune. A treasure in the hands of the strong was luck. Accepting that the guild's trust would crack, Simon had given him the weakness of the great nobles, and he judged that he had paid, in some measure, for a union member's wrong.
Worse than a dog, that little shit! I'll kill him with my own hands!
Simon ground his teeth. From the start he had told them to protect Lady Levi from a distance. He had never ordered anyone to glue themselves to her side. An unseemly incident was the last thing they could afford. Which meant some bastard in the guild had defied his order and set a man on Lady Levi—and a thoroughly rotten one at that.
Astonishingly, the guild was full of idiots who refused Simon's commands. The shape of it was obvious. Some noble house that wanted Levi Fault had likely bought off one of the union members, hoping to drag down what the girl was worth. And the union member, pleased with himself, had let himself be bought.
...Like a moron.
I'll kill him. I swear it.
Simon made up his mind. If he walked out of this room alive, he would find the man who had caused this disaster and tear him to shreds. He would make the man regret that he was alive at all.
And the knight who held that life spoke.
"You've the makings of a minstrel. Not a bad hand at laying a tale out."
Simon could only stare.
"Hm. Well. This much will do."
A few slippery words, and then he rose without hesitation and turned his back. Simon blinked.
"W-wait. You're just leaving?"
"What, want me to smash the rest of it too?"
"N-no, that isn't what I—!"
The things he wanted to say crowded his throat like a cough about to break free. He had explained himself. Shouldn't there be a reconciliation with the guild now—or if not reconciliation, at least some manner of understanding? Or did the knight want a deeper apology? Wasn't there something he wanted?
...Didn't he want to hear more of Levi Fault's circumstances?
Questions of that sort shoved all the way up to the soft of his throat. This was a knight who already held justification and strength, all of it. And after taking a few excuses and a scrap of information, he meant to turn around and leave, empty as that? Simon would not have. He would have squeezed them for every drop there was to squeeze, and kept on until the other man's face begged to be spared.
Just as that snarled interior was about to show—
"The rest would be my kid's household affairs. I've no mind to hear that from a stranger's mouth. So I won't hear the rest. Even a disciple's private life ought to be respected."
"...You have already intruded more than enough..."
"..."
"But you got lucky. I stopped the trouble before it happened, and I came to settle it myself. There were fools blocking my way in a manner I didn't care for, but they'll be in a hospital bed for a while, so I'll let this much pass."
"Kh—!"
"Last. You. Every time you talk, you're hiding something. Even so, there were no lies. That's why you're still alive."
"Y-you believe there was no falsehood in what I said?"
"That's how it felt to me. ...If I'm wrong, I'll come back and take the neck. I'm not the sort who looks the other way twice."
"...Haha. The guild is not quite so easy a place as that."
"Dunno. Didn't look that way to me."
He left behind a smile that meant more than it said, and went out through the wall he himself had broken, as if not a grain of regret remained.
Watching him go, Simon—
"Ha. Where do they even make a man like that?"
His head tangled without end. The knight had walked out so cleanly it felt almost hollow. At first he had seemed ready to burn everything down, and now he was calm as a windless lake. Simon took him for a kind of man he had never met, and before he knew it he was walking toward the place the knight had gone. Letting him leave like this sat wrong.
But.
A dry rustle.
Whoooom.
"——."
Simon, taking in what lay outside, lost his words in an entirely different sense. The secretary who followed landed hard on the floor in shock.
"...Th-this isn't a whole pack of large-class monsters attacking at once, is it?"
The secretary's mutter. Simon was of the same mind.
It had all come down. Of a building some five hundred square meters across, only the iron reinforcing and the pillars that held it up remained intact. Everything else had fallen, or stood on the verge of collapse.
And did he know what was more frightening than that?
H-he did this alone... a disaster, in barely ten minutes?
From the moment the raid alarm sounded, it had not even taken ten minutes to reach Simon's room. And the place had been reduced to this—about as bad as seven large-class monsters striking all at once. Past dizzying. The skin crawled.
More horrifying still:
N-nobody's dead?
There were people badly hurt. There were no dead comrades. Someone had once said that putting a man down while keeping him alive was harder than killing him. That difficult thing, the knight had done in that short a span.
...Without a scratch.
Simon felt as if he might piss himself.
Exaggerated skill? Don't make me laugh, you moronic bastards!
The day before, there had been officers who doubted the skill of the knight that had stopped the attack. All of it wild talk, they said. Nothing but lies. Probably inflated... Simon found himself honestly curious whether they could still spew that bullshit after witnessing this disaster, and he dropped where he stood.
"Haha. No wonder he could walk out so clean."
That was why. He had the confidence—the confidence that even if they nursed a grudge and came for him, he could sweep them away again whenever he pleased. Simon wore a bitter smile. Standing before a man like that, what was he supposed to do?
And, as chairman of the guild union, he thought.
"...Which of the two would win, I wonder."
"Pardon?"
"...Talking to myself."
The secretary had no answer for that.
A trial of strength between one lone knight and the Marquisate of Tristan. A foolish fancy he could not bring himself to say aloud. Simon shook his head.
...and left a thin thread of the possibility where it lay.