Lighthouse Village
The hopefuls rolled their eyes hard, scrambling to make sense of what was happening, but the only answer they received was a fist swinging inside a heavy gauntlet.
Thud. Crunch. Crack. Aaaaaagh!
The sound of the beating, of something breaking, and of screams rolled down the silent ravine of Lighthouse Village. In the middle of that uproar, several knights came toward me as well.
"……It's cold out. You'd do well to fasten your clothes."
The knight who caught sight of my face fastened my cloak, offered a careful bow, and passed on. Thanks to that, I was able to walk out on my own two feet.
"And what are you?"
"I—I'm Barton Wig……"
"You maggot! Who said you could run your mouth?!"
Mm. Any second now, one of them was going to drive a boot into a belly and roar that he'd caught an assassin.
Outside was pure chaos. Bewildering questions and beatings followed one another without a pause, and the fists of the plate-armored knights were considerate to a fault—they picked out the spots that hadn't been hit yet, so the massage never struck the same place twice. The hopefuls wore the vacant faces of recruits in their first days of basic, souls knocked clean out of them.
"Stand up straight, you worthless little shit!"
"I—I'm sorry!"
A man who'd just taken a slap across the face pitched forward in front of me. Not even thirty minutes in, and his eardrum was probably already gone.
So this is where the test begins.
Jin, sealed away for so long, seemed thoroughly delighted by the spectacle. There was a reason those viciously foul-mouthed military variety shows kept pulling ratings. Getting it done to you was the most miserable thing in the world—but as a show, nothing came close. I shuffled into a rough line and watched.
"What are you grinning at…… What are you looking at, you bastard!"
One knight, unable to make me out properly in the dark, came over—and for no good reason struck the hopeful standing beside me.
"Ghk?! S-Sir Knight! Why me?!"
"I don't like your face! I'll shove those cheekbones back in for you today!"
"Then why is that kid……"
"What kid?! Huh?! And now you're lying too?! You're finished today, you son of a bitch!"
Sorry, but what was I supposed to do about it? To the knights of Lighthouse Village, I was still the eldest son of House de Jevitz—the boy who might yet become their commander. Who was going to lay a careless hand on me if it meant drawing blood?
The beating went on for a solid hour. Aside from me, not a single hopeful still had a face in one piece. Even Amber's lip was split, and a livid bruise had darkened around her eye. Amid curses that never let up, the knights dragged us to the harbor.
Two skiffs and a small platform waited before the docks to greet the hopefuls. A bald man in heavy plate climbed onto the platform and launched into a speech.
"Good to see you, you little shit-sticks."
It was Sir Ragnar, Lighthouse Master. From up on the platform he went on, puffed up with himself.
"Sleep well? I do hope the welcome our order prepared was to your liking. Because we haven't even started yet."
The man standing up there was not the half-wit I had seen by day. He was a knight, and the Lighthouse Master who held the front line against the demons. That low, snarling voice rolled through the dawn air lying close over the water. More than a hundred hopefuls stared up at Sir Ragnar through bruised eyes.
"You came here to fight demons. Then you'd better learn what a demon is. The knights here will become demons and grind you down. They will drive you without end, and it will be hard enough to kill. Some of you may actually die. If you want to quit, quit whenever you please. We are not your nursemaids. We want comrades who will fight the demons at our side. We want knights who will stand on humanity's foremost line and hold the demons back without yielding, even to death. So if you're standing here on some half-baked resolve, leave this instant. But if you want to become a comrade, then give it everything you have. That is all."
When the speech ended, Senior Knight Helga took the platform and shouted.
"Those who can swim, the boat on the right! Those who can't, take the boat on the left! What are you standing around for?! Move, move!"
"Move your feet, you worthless shits!"
—Thud!
"Guhk!"
Another round of shouting and beating passed between them. Even with kicks and fists flying back and forth, the hopefuls flung themselves onto the skiffs in a hurry. I, of course, stood at my ease, then slipped aboard the right-hand boat near the very end.
In the dark of night the skiff put out until the harbor had shrunk to a speck. Small as the boat was, it pitched with every wave.
At Jin's words I looked toward the boat carrying those who couldn't swim. It had gone much farther out than the swimmers' boat before it finally halted, and from that skiff the knights shoved the hopefuls into the water. Distant as we were, the screams still tore the sky and drilled into my ears.
"You lot at least have the fundamentals. Unlike those vermin over there, who applied to the Human Lighthouse Order without even knowing how to swim. Today, for the crime of not knowing their place, they become fish food."
Ah. So that was it. I could roughly see the shape of the test. I swallowed a laugh and waited for what Helga would say next.
"What you have to do is simple. Swim back to the harbor. If you don't want to fail on the very first test, then swim for your lives!"
The moment Helga finished, the hopefuls leapt into the sea. I stayed on the boat with the knights and watched.
"Can you really afford to take it so easy?"
Seeing me dawdle, Helga came over and spoke. Easy? Hardly. I shed the cloak and loosened up, slow and deliberate.
"I'm giving those brain-dead idiots a chance."
If they noticed that I—the one who'd been receiving special treatment all along—was stalling on purpose, they would realize something about this test was wrong. Fail to realize it, and arriving at the harbor first wouldn't mean a thing. The test had never been about ranking us in the first place. Otherwise, why separate those who could swim from those who couldn't? Why haul the non-swimmers all the way out there just to dump them?
Looking down at the sea from the boat, the people who had just jumped split into two kinds. One: idiots swimming for the harbor at full strength, blind to everything in front of them and behind. Two: those striking far out across the water to save the hopefuls screaming for their lives and thrashing in agony. The first were many. The second were few. The ones who would pass were the second.
Whether calculation moved them or plain pity, it didn't matter. The heart of this test was finding comrades fit to fight demons—and in the confusion, these had refused to be taken in by an instructor's words, staking their own lives to save the "comrades" who had been abandoned. Drag them out of bed at dawn, beat them half to death until their judgment went soft, and test what kind of people they were. A truly vicious method.
An order with this much history wouldn't be one for nothing.
They have to learn to swim first. The knights won't be kind about teaching them. That process will be the sieve, and the useless ones will drop out on their own.
Yeah. Time to go.
I jumped calmly into the sea. It was the first time I had entered the ocean since coming to this world, but I had learned to swim in my previous life, so none of it felt strange. If anything, a body strengthened by training made it seem I could cover kilometers of open water without strain.
I swam on for a long while, as if I had strapped flippers to my feet, and before I knew it I had reached the source of the screams shearing through the dawn air. I counted heads. Fifteen thrashing in the water. Thirty coming to the rescue, myself included. Two rescuers to each one, and everyone could make the harbor safely. I had no intention of matching pace with anyone. Not one of the hopefuls had come anywhere near my level; they would only get in the way.
I seized the nape of a hopeful flailing nearby and hauled him along.
"Blub—blub—save—aaaaagh!"
Then I struck out across the sea at a maddening speed. The hopeful who had been raising a racket behind me soon went quiet. Passed out, by the look of it.
Hm? Someone's keeping up.
Amber. She too was dragging someone along, swimming with everything she had to catch me. I wasn't even giving the swim my all, and still—I was a Sword Expert, and she was a Sword User. Catching up shouldn't have been possible in the first place.
Tch. Reckless bravado.
In the original novel, she entered the Human Lighthouse Order at the head of her class. I thought I understood why, now. Skill and obsession like that—it would have been stranger if she failed.
If I want her under me, that temper has to break first.
I pushed my speed even higher, hoping she would burn herself out and fall away. Sure enough, she began wringing her body to match that pace. A fierce will reached me across the water: she meant to touch the harbor ahead of me, no matter what. The trouble was that the harbor was still a considerable distance off, and her flesh was still far too frail to bear that will.
She had been swimming through a freezing sea where the waves crashed hard, towing someone alone—and in that state she had forced herself to chase me. Sword User or not, her fall had been decided from the start. I turned and headed for Amber.
Something had gone wrong with her legs. She couldn't stay afloat, sinking and breaking the surface again and again, and the hopeful who couldn't swim still hadn't grasped what was happening. He had his arms locked around her neck and kept dragging her down.
"You don't need to hel—ghk!"
Whatever she was trying to shout, I struck Amber across the neck, then the non-swimmer. I hooked one under each arm and the third at my neck, and swam slowly on my legs alone. Closer to a feat of acrobatics than a stroke. But once you reached Sword Expert, even a feat like that came within reach.
Nothing ever comes the easy way, does it.
They always made you strain for it. Grumbling, I towed the three of them at an easy pace. Knight-level body or not, a human has only two arms. By the plain limits of that frame, I was bound to slide from the lead back into the rear. In the end, I was the last hopeful to reach the harbor.
"Cough! Cough! I……cough! didn't……need help……"
Amber had come around at some point. Face shoved into the sand, spitting seawater, she still glared at me with eyes on fire.
"Sure. Spare me the thanks. If you've got any strength left, wake those two sacks of luggage and haul them in."
"……"
I shook the water off and walked toward the platform. Dawn was breaking. The hopefuls were already drawn up before it, split into two groups. The ones who had passed would be the side where the half-drowned were crawling.
"You there, hopeful! Why are you late!"
Ragnar shouted from the platform.
"I was delayed pulling the ones who'd fallen in out of the water."
"I am quite certain I said the trainees who could not swim were to be abandoned. Why did you defy your instructor?"
"I want comrades who will fight demons beside me. If the ones who abandoned the drowning and went ahead just to pass are the ones who join the Order, then I have no wish to join a place like that."
"Stand to the right!"
Ragnar bared yellowed teeth in a brilliant grin. Then, once Amber and the stragglers arrived, he announced the results of the first induction test.
"Hopefuls who did not cast your comrades aside. Even under a merciless beating, you kept your judgment, saved comrades in distress, and proved your own character. Congratulations on passing the first test!"
From the platform, Ragnar declared that the first test was over, and that those who had passed and those who had failed now stood apart. Some were still lost, as if caught in a dream. A few wore faces of sheer disbelief, looking ready to protest. In the end, not one of them dared talk back to Ragnar's declaration.
"You are knight candidates now. Be proud. Rejoice. And fear the tests still to come."
One by one, people left the harbor, and behind their backs Ragnar's words rang out like a proclamation.