Lighthouse Village
"Everyone wears that look the first time they come here."
Helga must have thought I looked every bit the boy, gaping at the surroundings in a daze. Embarrassed, I scratched my head for no particular reason.
"I had no idea it was this beautiful."
"It exists to hold the demons back, after all. People these days take demons for empty superstition, but that hardly means a place like this can earn a kindly reputation."
He had been busy with his hands for some time, tending his sword.
"Even so, you are fortunate, Lord Bjorn. The ash has begun to fall here as well. Days this clear are rare. Until the year before last, we had no need of cloaks at all."
"Is that so. I can't remember the last time I saw a sky this lucid."
"Nor can I. On a day of achievement, weather like this must feel all the stranger."
"...Helga, is there anything you don't know? You're a damned ghost."
Helga finished with the blade, slid it into the scabbard, and smiled, sly and a little sheepish.
"Leak mana in clouds like that, and even a passing mutt could guess. I thought you were showing off."
"Dear me. Not being used to it yet, I must have slipped."
I hastily drew my mana back in. The total volume had grown, and I had apparently been dribbling it everywhere without noticing. So that was why Helga's eyes had been strange for a while.
"You should also know that you have thoroughly provoked my will to contend. Just how much faster do you intend to grow?"
Helga, too, had spent his whole life with a sword in his grip, and he stood at High-rank Sword Expert, a realm most people could not even approach. He must have been told he was talented more times than he could count.
"When I look at you, Lord Bjorn, I feel as if I might climb a little higher myself."
"Didn't you say Sword Master would be difficult?"
"Sword Master, yes. But one can grow plenty strong without obsessing over that. I am still on the young side. Time to burn again."
Whether the late thirties counted as young in this era was a fight I decided not to pick. While we traded idle talk, the carriage drew up in the inner courtyard of the Order's main castle.
Set beside the de Jevitz seat it was cramped, but it was a castle far more faithful to a fortress's original purpose. Anyone who meant to take it would have to be prepared for grievous losses.
If the enemy was human, that is.
While the Order hurried to sort the baggage, someone came striding over, already shouting.
"Helga, you son of a bitch! Why aren't you crawling over here already? If the supply run had gone sideways and the kids had gone hungry, what the hell were you going to do?!"
"The load was heavy this time. That is why we are late."
Strictly speaking, it was not the load. It was my unreasonable demands. Helga simply chose not to mention my stubbornness. I, meanwhile, was watching the scene with genuine curiosity.
Senior Knight Helga Sentle, bowing his head and taking it? As far as I knew, only one man in this place could make him do that: Ragnar, Lighthouse Master of the Human Lighthouse Order.
He had served at the lighthouse for more than thirty years, the spiritual pillar of the Order. His personal strength was nothing exceptional, but his excellence in tactics and strategy had made him the elder among elders, a man who had served House de Jevitz since before Canniel. I had heard the stories often enough. This was the first time I was actually seeing him.
Ragnar smoothed what little white hair remained at his temples and bellowed at Helga.
"Keeping time is the foundation of tactics! Ten minutes decides a field battle! The war's already over, and you show up with a rice pot—what, you gonna shove bread down a dead comrade's throat? You think grabbing a dead bastard's balls is gonna make him stand at attention?! And why the hell did you drag this dog of a carriage here?! Huh?! Helga, you little shit—pin on senior knight and now you're riding in carriages?!"
He was furious enough to kick the carriage's wooden wheel, hard, venting the whole of his rage on it. Watching him, I thought of the first sergeant from my army days.
"Why didn't you just strap on barding and dress up like a conquering general? Returned home in glory and didn't even stop by the village? Should've gone around bragging to every neighbor that you're a senior knight of the Lighthouse Order— Hey! And who the hell are you?!"
He jabbed a finger at me and shouted.
Of course he wouldn't know me. The cloak bearing the family seal had burned. I sent Helga a look that said I understood, and Helga sighed and drew a letter from his sleeve.
"The applicant for this enlistment examination..."
The moment the letter was in his hands, he tore it apart without so much as a glance.
"You maggot, who asked for a letter? I'm asking who you are. You're not a walking corpse—open that damn mouth and answer me, yeah? Mute? And this little shit's standing there with his hands behind his back, cocky as you please, while everybody else is busting their asses on the luggage. You here sightseeing?"
"...This is Lord Bjorn de Jevitz, eldest son of House de Jevitz. What you just tore up was a letter from Commander Canniel de Jevitz."
"Aigo! Young master! I've committed a crime worthy of death! Please take my head!"
Ragnar slammed his forehead against the courtyard stones, again and again.
"I've heard a great deal about you. Fierier than I expected, aren't you?"
"Aigo! That's not—"
"It's quite all right. I am not reprimanding you. How were you to know who I was at first sight? Even if you have served House de Jevitz for forty years. Isn't that so?"
"That's... well... No! I should have recognized you at once. Please gouge out these disloyal eyes of mine!"
"Come now. I said I was not reprimanding you. You will make a villain of me."
"I'm sorry! I'll— I'll kill myself!"
For a moment there was a commotion as people tried to stop Ragnar, who had drawn his sword and was making a great production of committing suicide. Once he finally came to his senses, he rounded on the knights sorting the luggage and shouted at them for no reason at all.
"You sons of bitches! How the hell did you attend the young master, for him to end up looking half-dead like this?! You should've caught him a griffin, not stuck him in a carriage! Come, come—please step inside first."
"That won't be necessary. Until the enlistment examination, I will lodge with the candidates."
"But... even so..."
"Spare me the objections and show me the way. Do you mean to leave me standing here?"
There was a brief quarrel, but having taken the wind out of him at the start made everything afterward easier. Helga, long accustomed to scenes of this sort, only looked at Ragnar with pity.
The place they led me to was a small cloister inside the Order's main castle, and a great many of those who would sit the enlistment examination were gathered there. A hundred or more, by a rough count. Not one of them matched another in age, looks, or height.
The minimum requirement for the Lighthouse Order's enlistment examination is being able to sense mana.
Sorting jade from ordinary stone is what the enlistment examination is for.
Even as I spoke with Jin, I kept studying the trainees' faces one by one.
Yeah. I just spotted her too. You mean that girl?
The one Jin had picked out was a rather slight girl. She looked at most a year or two older than me, and she had not been raised gently—her skin was a little reddened by the sun—but the ash-blonde hair suited her, and she was beautiful all the same. That someone not yet an adult was here at all meant she had already proven herself at least a Sword User.
From Earth's point of view, one might wonder what a woman was doing in a knight order. But in the world of the Esteria Chronicles, the gulf between those who could use mana and those who could not dwarfed any bodily limit that came of sex. A woman who knew how to handle mana could be set upon by dozens of grown men who did not, and not take a single scratch. That was why sex was no obstacle in this world—not in the knight orders, not in the Imperial Magic Corps, not even in the Church.
I had one reason for paying attention to a female aspirant who, here, was nothing special. The woman who looked like so little now—Amber Cutter—would enter the Human Lighthouse Order with the finest record of her cohort, and she was the only knight of the Order to survive to the end of the Esteria Chronicles.
Well. She had lasted to the end not because her skill was outstanding, but because when Bjorn de Jevitz, corrupted by demons, set foot in the lighthouse, he spared only her, so that she might carry word of the massacre at Lighthouse Village and spread the terror of demons far and wide. Even so, having saved her life that way, she would later, as the last knight of the Human Lighthouse Order, win brilliant merit beside Mion across countless battlefields.
But that alone was not why I meant to keep her at my side.
I'm taking that woman with me.
The world doesn't turn on strength alone.
I had no intention of moving in a hurry. As the enlistment examination went on, familiarity would build of its own accord, and then, little by little, I would draw her to my side.
What nagged at me more, just now, was Canniel's letter. That father of mine had written asking them to look after me? Given the chance, he would have had my head on a spike the day I was born. I didn't know what the letter said, but it was certainly nothing good. Something else bothered me as well: Canniel had sent me to the enlistment examination far too readily.
Unless I tore the letter open and read it, worrying would get me no answer. My body was exhausted from adapting to a dantian that had grown, and pulling myself together mattered more than wasting time on useless fretting.
I was just settling in to sleep when the surroundings suddenly grew noisy. The candidates were all asleep. It was still the deep dark before dawn. Outside the cloister I sensed a number of knights, heavily armed in armor and cloaks alike. They kicked the door in and roared.
"Get up! I said get up! You sons of bitches!"
Cloaks stamped with the emblem of the Human Lighthouse Order snapping behind them, the knights laid into the aspirants with their boots.