Daily Life in That Place
Stemwind, the star fortress. A vast castle standing guard over the North.
Once, it had been the first great stronghold raised by the Rodal, who fled the Homeland for the Esteria Continent to escape the demons that came riding in on the cold — an outpost built so they could massacre the Aria, the continent's native people. Now it was the capital of the North, and the ancestral seat of House de Jevitz, the House of Eternal Light.
At first I had wondered what a star fortress was doing in a medieval age that did not even possess a proper cannon. A star fort was a modern thing, earthworks heaped before the walls so that guns could not strike the stone with direct fire. But this world had an unknown power called mana. Knights and mages alike knew how to wield it, and magical fire, burning that unknown force for fuel, hit every bit as hard as cannon. That was how fortification techniques with no business existing in this era had developed anyway.
The setting compendium for Esteria Chronicles ran to a hundred and fifty thousand characters, and every last one of them was stuffed with trivia like this. Why does a genre novel need worldbuilding of that sort? Because that is what classic fantasy is.
"No ash today."
In the de Jevitz training yard, inside the walls of Stemwind Castle, I — Bjorn de Jevitz — gave in to the heat, undid the clasp of my cloak hood, and swept my hair back. Unlike my previous life, where a ruined face had kept me from so much as dating through my school years, Bjorn de Jevitz had the striking looks proper to the eldest son of a great house. A straight nose, large eyes, pale skin, blond hair shining like the house crest, and so on and so forth. You could have pasted on every flattering line of physical description ever written in a novel, and it still would have fit.
So fucking what.
I let out a long sigh. When the memories of my past life returned, I thought I had won the lottery. Eldest son of a great house was already a jackpot, and a face on top of it that looked ready to bewitch every woman alive! I had taken it for compensation, a reward for the pitiful death of the life before. Better still, this new body named Bjorn had an extraordinary gift for the sword. Unlike that previous life, walled off from anything resembling exercise, Bjorn was already, while still young, a sure bet for Sword Master — that realm second only to one, and above all the rest.
If I had not known this world was a novel, I might have gone on being happy. I would not have known how Bjorn de Jevitz ended.
In Esteria Chronicles, Bjorn de Jevitz's official setting was that of a once-in-a-century genius. Raised properly, he would have become humanity's steadfast shield in the great war against the demons still to come. But the moment he came of age, he lost the fight for the succession and was purged.
He was the eldest son, yet his birth mother was a collateral of the imperial house, married into de Jevitz for politics. It was all the Oxburg Empire, yes — but to the northerners who served House de Jevitz, Bjorn was an outsider. His footing was already weak, and then she had the poor timing to die on the day I was born. The moment she was gone, his father remarried as if he had been waiting for it, and promptly got a son on the new wife.
The grand reason — that the North's very identity might waver if Bjorn inherited — mattered less than a plainer truth. The eldest son of a noble house whose mother dies early rarely comes to any good end. There is a reason people speak of verdicts passed on the pillow. Whether the second wife's arts in the dark were simply that magnificent, his father purged him. Shoved aside by his stepmother's schemes and cast off by his own father, he had only just come of age. Eighteen.
The punishment given to that eighteen-year-old Bjorn was far too harsh. The sentence was exile from the Esteria Continent. In effect, they threw him to the demons like meat. It was the worst punishment a human being could suffer in this world.
Burning with revenge, Bjorn de Jevitz staked his life and made a contract with a demon.
"I'll offer up everything I have. Give me power."
"I'll stand at your vanguard and slaughter every last one of them."
Eyes soaked in blood and glowing red, Bjorn de Jevitz sold his soul, and the Demon King, who had been coveting that talent, granted the wish. Six years later Bjorn returned as the Demon King's vanguard and annihilated House de Jevitz with his own hands.
Kinslayer.
The title given to one who abandons human morality. A slur that suited him all too well, once he had become a great demon.
Finishing his revenge did not stop his advance. He rode the cold onward as if he meant to grind humanity down and drink it. The one who stopped that Bjorn was a white-haired old campaigner: Sir Landeros van Hos, Sword Saint of the Esteria Continent, Holy Knight of the End. Bjorn and that Holy Knight of the End perished together, and his short life was over. Landeros's holy sword, Galgduval, lost its master, drifted, and at last came into the protagonist's hands — and with that, the story of the novel Esteria Chronicles began.
A grand explanation. Put into a single line, it meant I was nothing but Extra Number One, the man who fired the opening shot of an epic.
I drove my longsword into the earth and hauled in a deep breath. I was fourteen. Four years left until the purge. Nowhere near enough time.
If only I had realized a little sooner that this was the world inside Esteria Chronicles. When I was small, my head had not grown enough to judge anything; once it had, I spent my time lost in the confusion of memories from the life before this one, and only now did I understand where I was. Should I call it a mercy that I had noticed even this late? The one hopeful thing was that, though I had forgotten my parents' faces from that past life, I had not forgotten the setting of Esteria Chronicles.
So that was it. Reborn as a kinslayer?
I was not curious which bastard had shoved me into a novel. Whatever their purpose, it had nothing to do with me. I simply had no intention of letting events run the way that bastard wanted. Not the protagonist. Not even a supporting part. They had stuffed me into an extra. Utterly sickening. They had spoiled my mood, so I would pay them back in the same coin.
I would turn this godforsaken classic fantasy into a trash web novel.
For instance. Do you know the easiest way to drag the dignity of classic fantasy down without limit? It is this.
What, after all, is a trash web novel? The protagonist swinging his cock however his cock pleases, stabbing it in and pounding away. Demon King, legendary hero — who gives a shit? I'll save one piddling little domain in the southeast, set up a harem, and live so the cunt-slick on the end of my dick never has a day to dry. Heh heh heh. I don't know which bastard you are, but can you really handle a reader this warped?
"Lord Bjorn, I understand that you are in the midst of puberty, but if a sword is in your hand, you ought to concentrate."
I turned toward the voice and found a familiar face. Even with a cloak hood hiding it, I knew him. My sword instructor, and a senior knight of the Human Lighthouse Order: Helga Sentle.
Would it kill you to make a little noise?
Covering my burning face with the cloak, I cleared my throat.
"Ahem. Helga. When did you get back from the lighthouse?"
Where was all that brush-off about being too busy to teach me the sword, and now you just appear? By rights he should have been at the lighthouse on the northernmost edge of the Esteria Continent, taking a vacation in a cool sea breeze. What I felt first was not welcome, but suspicion.
"I have not returned. I came down briefly to transfer a prisoner."
"A prisoner?"
In matters concerning the lighthouse, the Human Lighthouse Order held the right of summary execution. Bringing that prisoner all the way here — what was that supposed to mean?
"Because of that matter, the Commander has summoned you, Lord Bjorn."
"Only at times like this..."
I swallowed the rest. Treat me like I don't exist, and the moment it's convenient I'm the eldest son, is that it? The second I make Sword Master, I am walking straight out of this house. I ground my teeth and asked him.
"Helga. The way you see it, how long until I become a Sword Master?"
Originally, this world had no title called Sword Master. Of course it didn't. Esteria Chronicles was classic fantasy, and the first law of classic fantasy is an original world. Nobody was going to paste a trash-web-novel name like Sword Master onto a work like that. Transcribed phonetically, the proper term in this setting was pahukt sereuktenin. Shortened, they called it sereuktenin. In the language of the Rodal, it meant something like one who has become one with the sword. Esteria Chronicles had used the name spoken in the central lands, where the capital stood, and called it Parsede. Count the slang of the southwest, which had a history of being slaughtered by one, and there were a good ten names for a Sword Master.
I trusted the point of my calling it Sword Master had come across. The fine details differed, but its standing inside Esteria Chronicles was hardly different from a Sword Master in a trash web novel — and the name suited my goal of turning this world into one.
"A Sword Master is a realm second only to one, and above all the rest. With a mindset like that, you could train your whole life and never reach it."
"Who doesn't know that? Stop dodging. Objectively."
I released the mana in my dantian. At the least, I was pahukt setta anglenin — translated, whether one liked it or not, Sword Expert, Low-rank. Even a pahukt, a mere Sword User, could kick down the door of any knight order he pleased. And I had reached the stage above that, Sword Expert, at fourteen.
"...Judging by your present rate of growth, you should be able to reach my level within six years."
Helga Sentle was a Sword Expert, High-rank. A realm only a tiny handful could climb to, even after a human being trained to the limit and gathered mana in the dantian. Six years to that height. Which meant that however much talent backed me, Sword Master was still at least fifteen years away.
"So twenty-nine, if I'm fast?"
"If you are fast?! Those who have reached the realm of Sword Master at that age..."
"I know. I know I'm impressive."
The problem was that my head would be off my shoulders before then. What good is a pretty flower? Cut before it blooms, and that is the end of it.
"Lord Bjorn, becoming a splendid knight is not the only way to earn the house's recognition."
"Right. Then I'll castrate myself and become a eunuch. They can despise me all they like, and still have to treat me as one of the family."
"You go too far."
"Wouldn't that be lovely? Go back to my mother's house, potter about as a palace eunuch, and when I croak there's no succession squabble to make a noise about."
Helga said nothing.
"Helga. I'm not a suckling infant."
Not the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old ought to say, but I had lived twenty-five years on Earth — a civilization far more advanced than this place — and in South Korea, which sat among the developed nations at that. The shabby little political knife-fights of a medieval age were obvious at a glance. I had no intention of walking the novel's story as it was written. I did not know by what cause I had been reincarnated into this shitty classic fantasy, but I was going to survive it, teeth sunk in if I had to.
"We are late. The vassals are waiting."
Delaying any further would only put Helga in a difficult spot. I pulled the cloak hood up over my head. On the back of the cloak, the griffin crest of House de Jevitz, embroidered huge in gold thread, drank in the ash and shone a dull, clouded light.