Lighthouse Village
"What in the world—what in the world! What kind of spectacle is this supposed to be?! How could such a calamity happen?! Serving House de Jevitz is my duty! Please, I beg you, let me carry that duty out! Unworthy as I am—like this—I plead with you!"
"Good grief, I told you I understand. Helga, since when are you my nursemaid?"
I had been listening to Helga's scolding since the crack of dawn. I hadn't slept a wink, and with my mana spent I was dead on my feet.
When I came out of the mine, the sun had mercifully not yet risen. My relief that so little time had passed lasted only a moment. Somehow she had already learned I was gone, and Helga had turned the Lighthouse Knights loose to search the whole of Lothric Village. It was a mercy she found me first. A little longer, and I would have suffered the humiliation of showing my naked body to the servants.
They're not my knights. They're my father's.
My head was a mess already, and now Jin had to shove his way in.
So long as that rising house doesn't drive a blade through my neck.
Yeah. I'll tell you the whole of it in a bit.
I decided to ignore Jin for the moment. Calming Helga came first.
"What matters is that I found the dungeon. Think about it. If the miners had stumbled onto it in the middle of their work, how much worse would the damage have been?"
"And you truly believe that is what matters? What possessed you to go into the mine in the dead of night in the first place?!"
"Didn't you say that if I change the place where I gather mana in my dantian, I can draw mana of a slightly finer quality? I wanted to test it. How was I supposed to know there was a dungeon down there?"
"Precisely my point. Thanks to that, how many charges do you imagine now hang about my neck? If my head were struck off and hung from a pole this very moment, I would not even have grounds to protest."
"Isn't the merit greater than the fault? Discovering a dungeon is an enormous achievement. Even if I'm the one who found it."
I said it in a tone that meant she could stop the groaning.
"I have already reported the matter to my superiors, as it happens. Personnel from the Holy See will be dispatched before long."
"And you, Helga, will pocket a fat reward while you're at it. Shouldn't you be thanking me?"
"I would rather live as a knight of the Lighthouse Order and never touch a few miserable coins!"
Still unable to settle, Helga kept lifting her back from the carriage seat and setting it down again.
"I took only a brief look inside, and it was no weak dungeon. Had there not been a dead frost golem beneath that collapsed ceiling, Lord Bjorn would have met a wretched end in there with no one the wiser. However much of a Sword Expert you may be, a frost golem is an enemy no one can face alone. It was heaven's own luck! Heaven's luck!"
I was the one who brought that ceiling down and killed the frost golem. I nodded as if I knew nothing at all.
"All right, all right. I'll be careful next time. Satisfied?"
"Yes. I beg you, please do."
If nobility had one advantage, it was that even a disaster of this size ended in a verbal warning. I offered my sincere condolences to the Lighthouse Order, who had gone without a proper sleep while searching all of Lothric Village for me. I didn't know how much longer I could go on enjoying the privilege, so I meant to wring every last drop from it.
And so, for the moment, the incident was closed.
Helga went off with the Lighthouse Knights to see to the baggage, and I sat in the inn, ate breakfast through sleepy eyes, and came back out. Outside, ash was pouring down in one heavy fall, the way it always did.
The ash falling from the sky seemed to fascinate him. Before Jin was sealed, volcanic ash must not have covered the world.
It's pouring out of a volcano called Red Hill.
That's the one. For some time now the ash has been thick enough to blanket even the sky up here in the north. If this keeps on, the temperature will drop, and within a hundred years the demons will come down onto the Esteria Continent.
In truth it would be ten years from now, but there was no need to be honest with him about that. At the shocking news of the continent's recent state, Jin's dismay was plain.
That ball of flame was pitching an absolute fit overhead, and not a soul paid it any mind. Jin, then, had to be visible to me alone.
Is there even a way to stop the temperature from falling?
And where are those two now?
Jin didn't know it, but the temperature would not finish falling for another ten years. Finding his body at my leisure four years from now would not be too late. I had a rough idea of where that body was, besides.
But why had Jin, strong enough to be counted the Demon King's equal, lost at all? The old tales said that arrogant Jin, drunk on his own skill, ignored the counsel of the other gods, fought the Demon King in single combat, and was defeated.
Was that true? I pulled the spare Lighthouse Knight cloak Helga had scrounged for me over my shoulders and spoke.
Anyway. How did you end up sealed in a mine like this?
He didn't seem inclined to tell it just yet. Fair enough. It wasn't the sort of tale you spilled easily to someone you barely knew. I didn't press.
I know finding your body comes first, but I have things I have to do as well. I didn't set a four-year grace period for nothing.
My standing in the family isn't good.
I laid my circumstances out for him, calmly. My position in the house. What the Lighthouse Knights were. The place called the Lighthouse, where I was bound even now, and why I had had no choice but to apply to the order. Jin listened without interrupting, then nodded.
Yes. Even now my stepmother is laying plans, hour by hour, to kill me. If I secure my position, gathering information will be far easier when the time comes to find your body.
Fallen or not, a god was still a god. Jin had read the situation exactly.
Possible, if I live that long.
Right now I was a lion cub abandoned in an open field. Every beast around me was desperate to snap my neck before I could grow. For the present I had to keep my body low, my head bowed, and move without a sound.
A hero? What are you talking about? I have no intention of being one.
What kind of bullshit is that? A real man lives however his cock gets hard. Once I'm finished with the north and I've found you your body, I'll hand the Flame Essence straight back, take a domain somewhere in the southeast, and raise myself a palace of wine and flesh. I'll live so the cunt-slick never dries off the tip of my dick.
Jin seemed thrown by the words; he blazed up hot. But what was I supposed to do? Every time I spat something that low, I felt a thrill at the thought of dragging this world down to the level of a dime-a-dozen web novel. Ah—I was defiling the canon! At Jin's reaction, a brief shiver ran through me.
A promise is a promise, isn't it?
While Jin and I traded our jokes, the knights who had been hauling the baggage at a brisk pace formed ranks before Helga. The packing, it seemed, was done. Helga was directing them through a last check before departure when someone shouted toward the order.
"P-please... please accept me into the Lighthouse Knights!"
It was a small child, younger even than I was. Twelve, at the most generous count. Grimy clothes, hair matted into clumps, a face thick with dirt—unmistakably a commoner. For a child, the only things worth noting were a body that was rather sturdy, and a pair of kind eyes.
The knights of the Lighthouse Order merely looked at the boy with an expression that said, Again?
The Lighthouse Order took in anyone with the skill, regardless of station. Considering how fiercely closed knight orders usually were, it was a startlingly open way of recruiting—almost suspiciously like something out of a mass-market fantasy novel. Which was why the members of the Human Lighthouse Order themselves went about insisting they were the Lighthouse Order, not a knight order. It was not a convincing claim.
The Human Lighthouse Order had begun as a coastal guard in Homeland, once the home of our people, the Rodal. Because their origin was a guard corps, they could remain free of the class system even while being, on paper, a knight order under the Emperor's direct command. Without that, they could never have maintained a monstrous strength of nine thousand.
Not mere commoner knights—nine thousand knights formally commissioned by the Emperor himself! Every one of them was granted a fief the moment they joined, and that fief was Homeland, the homeland of the Rodal, where demons now lived. It was both a fierce declaration that Homeland would be reclaimed, and the Emperor's way of giving no fief of any substance to the Human Lighthouse Order, which was subordinate to House de Jevitz.
A knight without a real fief was the same as a man whose labor would go unpaid. And so House de Jevitz paid the knights of the Human Lighthouse Order their wages. That was precisely why an order under the Emperor's direct command could not help but feel so little of the Emperor's hand.
I'll pass over the smaller points of setting. At any rate, for commoners with no sure way to make a living, the Lighthouse Order was the only road upward into knighthood. And so people had a habit of clinging to the Lighthouse Knights' procession and throwing shameless fits, demanding to be taken in just like this. Most of them lived too far from Lighthouse Village, or were caught by the age limit and could not readily sit the entrance examination.
When that happened, the Lighthouse Knights had a way of handling it.
"Boy. Beat me, and I'll accept you into the Lighthouse Knights."
The one who had stepped out to face the child was a new knight, not long in the order. A Sword User. He tossed the boy a sword as tall as the child himself and stood there with the irritated face of a man whose turn it happened to be.
I watched the scene with a bored expression. When a knight of the Lighthouse Order came out like that, a hundred out of a hundred would tuck their tails and run. This boy was different. He stubbornly tried to lift, in both hands, a sword he could not even grip properly.
Oh? How extraordinary?
Only then did I really look at the boy.
The youngest knight drove him into the ground again and again. They could hardly kill him, so the meaning was that he should give up of his own accord. But the boy took up the sword and began to imitate the youngest knight's swordsmanship—the footwork, the path of the blade, the control of strength in each swing, even the grip. It was clumsy, but he was keeping up well enough.
At first, one exchange. Then two. Then three.... The exchanges only lengthened as time went on. A light came into the eyes of the knights who had been watching with indifference.
"Stop!"
I halted the spar, stepped down from the carriage, and approached the boy.
"Boy. What's your name?"
Mud plastered all the way up his face, the boy gave his name with perfect calm.
"I am Mion. Grandmother told me that if anyone asks my family name, I should answer Woodman."
Woodman was a word for the trade of a woodcutter, not a proper surname. It meant, in the plainest terms, a child of the lowest birth.
But I knew who this boy was.
Mion.
The protagonist of the Esteria Chronicles.
The one destined, in days to come, to deliver humanity from the crisis of the Demon King.
He was standing before me.