Lighthouse Village
Looking back, the Mion of the novel had wanted to leave this rural nowhere. The early chapters made it plain that he admired the Human Lighthouse Order as well. He was simply too young to sit the entrance examination, and so he had planted himself in the knights' path again and again, crying out to be taken into the Order.
That effort had actually borne fruit. Even before he came of age, a knight had promised him outright that the next time he came, a place would be prepared especially for him. But by some trick of fate, that very year the Human Lighthouse Order was slaughtered to the last by me—Bjorn de Jevitz, turned demon.
I had meant to look him up at least once anyway. And here he was, walking right up to me on his own two feet.
I swallowed my delight and spoke with a chill.
"The Human Lighthouse Order seeks comrades to fight beside. It has no need of a piglet to feed and raise."
"I-I am not a piglet!"
"Then what are you? Shouting that you want to be a knight when you can't even hold a sword properly—is that something a person does?"
"Th-that's—!"
"Then tell me. Why do you want to be a knight?"
Mion, who had seemed flustered for a moment, soon found his composure again and spoke.
"When I nearly died to a bear, the benefactor who saved me belonged to the Human Lighthouse Order. I want to become like him."
Ah. So that was why he had clung to the Order so fiercely. A gap in the novel felt as if it had just been filled.
"You aren't ready to become a knight. And so..."
I stepped in close to Mion.
"I, Bjorn de Jevitz, eldest son of House de Jevitz, will receive you as my page when I pass this way again, once my business at the lighthouse is finished. Learn at my side. Master what you are taught. Then become a knight."
"...Truly? That I should dare... to receive such an honor..."
"I swear it on the name of my house. So see that every preparation is finished before I return."
"Thank you! Truly, thank you!"
To become page to a powerful house was the same as gaining a patron one could rely on. From this moment until the day I was cast out, Mion's rise was as good as guaranteed. Mion, who could hardly fail to understand that, poured out his thanks without pause.
"Do we really have to go all the way back? Can't you just take him with you?"
Jin's tone made it plain enough. If I meant to keep the boy under me and use him anyway, why bother returning?
No. The Human Lighthouse Order is not my knight order.
Mion was the protagonist of this novel. If I could only keep him under my command, not even a mighty host would frighten me. But drag him into the entrance exam as things stood, and he would become a knight of the Human Lighthouse Order, not my direct subordinate. I was not about to cook the porridge and then serve it up to that trash of a father.
I would raise him properly, and use him as a shield so that no demon could ever come down upon the grand estate of wine-lakes and meat-forests I meant to claim for myself someday.
"Heh heh heh. Well. If we're finished here, let's be off."
To think I had gotten my hands on Mion as well. I hadn't expected things to go this smoothly. My business in Lothric Village was done. It was time to go to Lighthouse Village and see the entrance exam through.
I climbed back into the carriage.
The high road narrowed, and at every fork the milestones of the journey pointed toward only one place. Lighthouse Village, our final destination, was nearly upon us. Finished with the last camp, the Order was folding its tents in high spirits.
Early morning, a little way off from the campsite, I sat alone with my legs crossed, lost in the work of guiding my breath and circulating my energy. Training had begun, with Jin's help.
Hah. Training.
Wasn't the whole trend of web novels to grab a single early fortune and smash every clay pot in reach with it—Sword Master, Heavenly Demon, the lot? Canon or not, I had already landed a monstrous boon like the Prime Flame. What was I doing, sitting here training like a fool?
Pathetic. Downright pathetic.
"Try gathering a little more of the Prime Flame's mana into your dantian."
"Draw in any more than this and I feel like the dantian will crack."
"Quit complaining and trust me."
From the day I met Jin, I had been working to get the Prime Flame under my control. Unlike her usual playful self, she was a rather strict teacher, and her skill stood so far beyond comparison that nothing else could be set beside it. After only a few days of training with her, my dantian had already passed the low grade and was reaching toward the middle.
A knight, by nature, can use nothing but the mana stored in the dantian beforehand, so expanding the dantian is—in the language of a machine—increasing the size of the battery. It was also a patch for the weakness knights are born carrying. I had thought the problem did not apply to me, who held the Prime Flame, because it fed me mana without end, as if I were plugged into a wall socket. Unfortunately, that had been my mistake.
"I thought that if I had the Prime Flame, I wouldn't have to worry about the dantian!"
"If you want to handle the Prime Flame properly, you have to temper the body to match. Otherwise the balance breaks and the body is ruined. You don't mean to stake your life every time you draw on its power, do you?"
The Prime Flame was the power of godhood. Its purity stood far beyond anything ordinary mana could match, and its explosive force was on another plane entirely from common magical power. To use that strength properly, one needed a sturdy frame, a larger and harder dantian, and the resilient body that came of them. Fail in that, and one could burn up in the Prime Flame and die where one stood.
I fixed my mind on the surging fire of the Prime Flame and gathered mana into my dantian.
Enlarging a dantian is, of course, no easy thing. Can a man widen his lungs just by drawing a deep breath? He has to drive himself like a madman for a long time, training his endurance, before they grow even a little. The dantian is the same. It does not widen simply because one packs it full of mana. The body has to be pushed, relentlessly and without mercy. In that respect the Prime Flame helped. Fan it even slightly and it roared into a blaze, driving the dantian to its limit.
"...Kh!"
The moment I drew the Prime Flame's mana into my dantian as Jin had said, agony came. Pain climbed from below my navel, and I knit my brow. From the very top of the low grade to the bottom rung of the middle, the dantian tore, took its wounds, and grew.
"Hah... hah... I nearly died."
Wiping away sweat that poured off me like rain, I drew a long breath. Sword Expert, mid-rank, at the age of fourteen. An achievement that didn't feel real—and a height I could never have reached so quickly without Jin and the Prime Flame.
A god, sure enough. Was the state of a human body nothing more than something that fit in the palm of her hand?
"...This actually worked?"
"What?"
This little shit. Had she just tried to get me killed?
I glared at her through ragged breaths, and Jin had the air of someone about to whistle, if only she had possessed a mouth.
"Don't stare at me like that. I was testing your talent. You're an odd case. The sort of material that makes me curious how far you can be raised. Even in the middle of that brutal Great War, there weren't many children like you."
"Don't change the subject. You were about to kill me and take the Prime Flame, weren't you?!"
"What do you take a god for?! I am Jin of the Flame! Why would I kill someone I brought back to life?! I really was only confirming your talent! My prediction was merely a little off."
Was I supposed to applaud my insane talent, the kind that could make sport even of a god? I flopped onto my back on the ground and asked.
"Oh, really? Then let me ask you this. How long do you think it'll take me to reach Sword Master?"
"That's the extent of your goal? How paltry."
Live long enough, and you hear a Sword Master called paltry. Had she been sealed so long that her sense of reality had gone rotten?
Put another way, the word this world used for a Sword Master meant, where the sword was concerned, beneath only one and above every other soul alive. Save for the Sword Saint Landeros, they were the strongest beings force of arms could produce. People commonly said a Sword Master's strength rivaled that of ten thousand ordinary men.
Even back on Earth, where there was no such thing as mana, the records showed a single medieval knight laying a village to waste, and a mere three hundred knights smashing an enemy of twenty or thirty thousand. How much more would that hold in this fantasy world, where magic was real? A Sword Master would, of course, run out of mana and die before butchering all ten thousand soldiers, but it was still true that the strategic gain one Sword Master brought stood higher than that of ten thousand common troops.
"Humans, I mean. Has peace lasted so long that you've grown too weak? Barely ten Sword Masters on the whole of the Esteria Continent. During the Great War they rolled around by the hundreds."
"Humans didn't grow weak. They turned in a different direction."
Set beside the age of the Great War, it was true enough that the number of Sword Masters had dropped sharply. But humanity's martial power had not weakened. They had simply chosen the gathering of the many called magic over the individual might called the sword.
"So how long will it take to reach my paltry goal?"
"If you grow skilled at handling the Prime Flame, three years is enough to face a Sword Master. For you yourself to reach that realm... roughly five years?"
Helga had told me it would take fifteen years at the earliest before I became a Sword Master, and she had called even that an absurd speed. With Jin's help, though, and depending on my own effort, I could become a Sword Master as early as nineteen. A thing without precedent in history.
Even so, the problem was that the novel left only four years before Bjorn de Jevitz was purged, which made it a razor's edge. This insane canon. I land a heaven-sent fortune and still have to worry about my life? What kind of broken difficulty was this supposed to be?
"I'd like to keep training a little longer, but..."
"Your body is already at its limit. And didn't you say you have to prepare for the entrance exam?"
As Jin said, we were due to reach Lighthouse Village before the morning was out. I had to prepare for the examination tomorrow.
"But what is this entrance exam, exactly?"
"I don't know the details myself. The exam runs to a third round, and the first round changes its method every year. From what I picked up off the Order's knights, one cohort covered the applicants' faces with cloth, sprayed them with seawater, and picked whoever lasted longest. Another cohort just beat them half to death all day and chose the ones who endured."
"Isn't that just torture?"
"The Order's duty is to protect the Esteria Continent from the demons beyond the sea. You have to be ready for the day you fight them."
Crude as it was, it was also an effective way to screen out applicants with weak minds. Demons do not gnaw at the flesh alone. What was needed were people who would not collapse under an assault on the spirit. The body can be grown through effort, but mental strength cannot, and so, however crude the method, this was how knights of the Human Lighthouse Order were chosen.
"Do you really have to join the Human Lighthouse Order? You won't even be able to train properly in the meantime. Weren't you in a hurry?"
I don't strictly need to join. But sitting the Order's exam is how I buy time. And there's someone I have to meet.
Stemwind was busy just now with the Final Council. The next few months would be loud. Had I been in Stemwind at this moment, I would have been buried under governance and scheming, unable to do a thing. The greatest reason I had applied for the entrance exam was to meet Jin, but buying time had been part of it as well.
The examination would run for three months. In that span I had to make the fortune I had gained as much my own as I could. Looking back, I had been lucky. Jin and Mion—I had reaped more from both than I had expected. And so a little room had opened up. Room enough to meet her at the examination grounds and bring her over to my side.
"Anyway, if you've strength to spare, the training continues even during the entrance exam. I won't go easy on you."
Just what I wanted.
When I returned to the camp through the morning dew, the Order had already finished preparing to depart. The carriage journey I had grown sick of would end today as well.
How far up the slope had we climbed? Beyond the dense forest, the vast sea came into view. A small harbor faced that endless water, and buildings of white stone under blue roofs embroidered the hillside in a beautiful pattern. At the end of them, raised against emergency, the Order's fortress on the slope and the lighthouse beyond it stood as if to welcome us.
The ash had not yet reached this far. A clear sky lay reflected, whole and unbroken, upon the blue sea past the harbor.
The northernmost reach of the Esteria Continent. The first ground the Rodal had set foot upon after coming down from the Homeland. The front line of a war with the demons that had never ended, and the place the Human Lighthouse Order had been ready to defend with their lives, all to stop Bjorn de Jevitz, the reprobate who had forsaken every human tie.
In the novel, this was where House de Jevitz—Canniel de Jevitz among them—was slaughtered to the last.
This was Lighthouse Village.