Ragnis Lien da Levien
Ragnis Lien da Levien
As soon as Asilie came to her senses, she delivered a merciless smack to my back.
In the end, it took ages to calm Asilie down. She was sobbing her eyes out and hammering my back like she meant to break it, and I only managed to settle her after Ragnis and Alisha helped.
'No, I mean, it's so high that you actually have plenty of time before falling, so it's safe...'
'Do you want to watch your sis's heart burst and die?!'
'Hey, you clueless fucking bastard!'
'Are you really that clueless?!'
But in the end, I slipped up with one word and got smacked by three women's palms. Really. It fucking hurt.
'To think I'd solve an absurd case and end up getting a beating.'
'Honestly, to an observer it was heroic enough to make a minstrel weep... but when you're family, it's enough to make your blood pressure explode.'
Gies listened to me complain, gave a wry smile, and answered with a point I couldn't really argue against.
In the end, Gies and the wyvern couldn't really move openly until Ragnis came of age and was formally recognized as Margrave. Whatever the circumstances of our first meeting, he'd played a major role in saving her. Once Alisha heard the story, she gave him a room for free, so he stayed at her inn.
We were all questioned by the guard force, but no serious problem came of it. More precisely, one almost did, but it didn't become an issue thanks to the witness testimony.
As time passed, Ragnis's birthday approached.
"I really don't want to get involved in this one..."
"You pulled that reckless stunt hundreds of meters up in the sky and now you want to back out at the end?"
Ragnis, sitting in her chair and doing her best to look calm, gave me an exasperated look as if I'd just said something completely absurd.
"Save words like 'last' for the grave."
"Don't try to dodge with useless talk."
While normally she would have let it slide, Ragnis took an utterly stubborn stance and cornered me. Of course, since this might be the last time we see each other, I could understand how she felt, but she could simply chat for a while and step aside when the Royal Faction's party arrived. But she demanded I accompany her to the end out of anxiety, and even Asilie sided with her, leaving me stuck killing time at Alisha's inn.
But what could I do? My goal had only ever been to punish and retaliate against anyone who messed with the people around me. This time, unfortunately, some of them had ended up paying with their lives, but my part was over. My body was fine, which meant I needed to get back to training. Whatever I'd just gone through, what lay ahead of me was bigger and more dangerous. It was a shame that Delt was dead and every prisoner knew so little that Ragnis's grand plan to follow the trail upward and deal the Noble Faction a blow had gone up in smoke, but that was a separate problem.
"I didn't plan that far."
"That kind of soft attitude isn't good. Especially if you're going to live as a Margrave."
It wasn't advice to give a girl barely sixteen, but ultimately, whatever my common sense said, she was an adult in this world. It was clear that the path ahead for her, who today formally became the heir and succeeded to the Margrave's seat, would be a thorny road. Though without a territory to protect, she'd be a Margrave in name and wealth only for a while, but her influence would gradually grow over time, and far more meticulous schemes than this one would continue to torment her.
"You need to understand that you're heading into a world where Daddy-Long-Legs Eldmia won't be around to help you anymore."
"So now you're not even Big Bro—you're some old man?"
"R-Right..."
"Right. Eldmia, whose mental age is over thirty, must possess the wisdom of a middle-aged man."
As payback for her insolently hijacking my line, I ruffled her hair.
"You know it."
"...Can't Eldmia come along too?"
"I have to train under Asilie for two more years and then go slit the throat of the commander bastard who wrecked our village, so I'm busy."
Delt dying without even crossing swords with me once had been entirely situational. Faced with something completely outside common sense, he'd needed a split second to process it, and my enhanced body let me exploit that opening and kill him in one stroke. Even then, if I hadn't deliberately drawn out my Magic Power and gone in at full strength, he might have counterattacked in that tiny window.
The moment I cut his throat, the instant I saw his expression of belatedly understanding everything and accepting death, I knew. Though in that moment I'd felt pure joy that all those reckless attempts had clicked and succeeded in one shot, now I didn't. If it had been a head-on fight, the one dead would have been me. Despite the existence of such a bastard, despite there being many even more outstanding than him, the Demon King's Army was still there, and without killing the Demon King, the war had dragged on for six years. To hold onto my convictions, there were too many strong opponents I had to surpass. And so, time that had never felt particularly scarce before now felt desperately insufficient. I couldn't help but develop an obsession.
"The Royal Faction has plenty of excellent knights. My position is considerable enough that they even scripted today's ceremony just to bring me here. If you want, negotiation is fully possible."
So you can formally learn swordsmanship from a knight. Gazing at me with an endlessly serious face and resolute eyes, Ragnis declared it. It wasn't a wrong statement, nor an empty one. And it wasn't a bad condition either. If a knight's help couldn't be obtained, she'd even consider using personal funds to shove me into the Royal Academy in the capital to give me a chance to learn. I knew well just how grateful she felt toward me due to the chain of events. That was precisely why there was a part I couldn't readily accept.
"Who would teach someone you can't even use as a common soldier, a guy who'd run off for revenge the moment he gets the skill?"
"Still, there might be someone who sees your talent and bestows teaching. Surprisingly, there are plenty of stories like that."
"I wonder. If someone at the level of the King's Ten Swords came and told me to learn, I'd consider it."
If I learned from people like that, I'd learn what I needed, and then what they'd considered talent would turn out not to be talent, and I'd naturally get kicked out, wouldn't I? Come to think of it, that might be quite an appealing scenario.
"Even among them, there's a hierarchy of skill, you know. Are you saying you'd consider it even if it's just the 10th?"
"If someone is one of the King's Ten Swords, I'm in no position to be picky. If they're Fifth Sword or higher, I wouldn't even have to think—I'd be begging them to take me."
I answered with a laugh, hoping we were finally moving from the heavy atmosphere into a light joke.
"Those words."
But then.
"Don't go back on them."
With a smile that clearly carried a different meaning from mine, Ragnis threw out a weighted line.
That smile was... right. It closely resembled the smile she'd shown, as if I was laughable, back when I lied about Ragnis beating up a thug. Because of that, an inexplicable chill ran down my spine.
"Hey, that's scary, so don't smile like that."
"A smile full of goodwill is scary? That's too much."
"What's this about goodwill? One look at that smile and it's obviously saying, 'How cute. You think you can set a condition like that for me? Think I can't do it?'"
"If that works out to Eldmia's benefit, then in the end, isn't it a smile full of goodwill?"
Her deepening smile spurred on the fear. Like a predator eyeing its prey, it gave me the illusion that the very ground was rumbling with pressure... Wait. It really was rumbling?
"Looks like they've arrived."
Fortunately, I wasn't the only one sensing something unreal; Ragnis stood up from her seat, looking outside the inn. Wondering what the hell they were bringing to cause this, I followed her outside and couldn't do anything but doubt my own two eyes.
"Holy fucking shit."
On the largest road leading to the inn, people were splitting left and right to make way.
"This is what you meant when you said they were coming to get you?"
Beyond the parting crowd, five figures—obviously a noble, knights, and a mage—strode in majestically upon horses clad in splendid barding.
"I told you. A script mindful of public eyes."
Ragnis answered as she stepped up beside me, but I couldn't bring myself to look away from the sight ahead. Behind the five riders, dozens of soldiers marched in tight formation, their steps perfectly synchronized. They wore standard kingdom army armor far beyond anything the city guards had, and the sight of them escorting a single carriage was genuinely spectacular. At the same time, I understood why Ragnis had said goodbye to everyone except me the day before. Today, she wasn't Levi from Alisha's inn. She was Ragnis Lien da Levien, the last survivor of the family that had guarded the Kingdom of Itisel. She couldn't simply exchange an ordinary farewell.
"It's been a while. Sir Ekaf."
Before I knew it, Ragnis had stepped three paces forward and addressed one of the five riders with the bearing of a hero who would go down in history. The knight, impossible to miss with his platinum blonde hair and clear purple eyes, dismounted along with the others and slowly opened his mouth.
"The King's Third Sword, Ekaf Tusin Ogatorf, offers his greetings to the shield of the Kingdom, Margrave of Levien."
Because she was now an adult, without any flowery rhetoric, he simply addressed her as Margrave and knelt.
As he went down on one knee first, the others who had dismounted likewise knelt. When they knelt, the soldiers in formation knelt as well. When the soldiers knelt, even the citizens standing around dumbfounded and watching knelt in the same suffocating silence.
I was so fucking shocked I missed the timing to kneel.