But It Was Big, Though
But it was big, though.
“Ahhh~ My peerless beauty must be the greatest among all the lady knights in history. I’m just too gorgeous~”
“Oho, Rachel? So you acknowledged your own peerless beauty?”
“…I never said any such thing.”
Rachel denied it with a look of pure disbelief.
Not once in her life had she ever thought her face was peerless.
“My, look at this honey-smooth skin~ Don’t attack the face, alright~? If you scar it, I might just kill you~”
“Hmm, Rachel. You were surprisingly coquettish beneath that exterior?”
“…I have most certainly never been coquettish.”
Rachel denied it with a face that said she had heard enough nonsense for one lifetime.
To someone who had spent her entire life keeping femininity at arm’s length, the line was both absurd and faintly humiliating.
“My magic swordsmanship has reached the realm of the heavens! The only one who can defeat me is myself!”
“Truly befitting my escort knight. A person needs confidence if they want to succeed. Excellent.”
“…I have never reached the realm of the heavens.”
Tremble, tremble.
A crease formed between Rachel’s usually impassive brows.
She had walked every path with humility precisely because she knew confidence so easily became arrogance.
“I’m not weak because I’m a woman! I’m weak because I submitted to a weak world! I will never submit—!”
“Oho, weak because you submitted to a weak world. That is a truly magnificent line. I see you in a new light, Rachel.”
“…D-do not see me in a new light.”
The face of the blunt, taciturn Rachel—who would never utter such cringeworthy lines—grew steadily redder.
To someone so mismatched with that brand of emotional excess, the dialogue was pure mortification.
Her fist clenched.
Every time Elden found a passage he liked and recited it as if performing a dramatic reading, she wanted to give him a solid knuckle to the skull.
Why, lately, was he doing things he never used to do, taking interest in things he never used to notice—and doing it all so damnably smugly?
“With this sword I will cleave the cloudy sky and brighten the world, so that dreams and hope may pile into mountains for all people to climb.”
“Khh—now that is a romantic line. Enough to send a shiver down the spine. Rachel, contrary to appearances, you were the optimistic type?”
“…No. I have never enjoyed romance, nor have I ever been optimistic.”
Tremble-tremble-tremble-tremble.
She had always believed the world was ugly, filthy, and dark.
That was why she had lived so tenaciously, surviving with every kind of filth and blood clinging to her.
Romance was trash. Optimism was a sin.
Who the hell was this person?
Who had taken such pathetic delusions, put them into writing, and insulted her very convictions?
With each successive wave of shame and humiliation, Rachel’s face grew redder still.
And then—
“Ah, this figure the Lord God Himself must have molded—even I have to admit it’s fantastic, you know~? Hiding something like this is clearly a sin.”
A sidelong glance.
“…D-do not look at me with those lecherous eyes.”
“Rachel, you always keep it covered, so I never knew. Looks like you’re surprisingly confident about your figure?”
Another sidelong glance.
“…Even you, Young Lady? Why are you looking at me like that as well?”
“Hee… Humans always long for what they don’t have! I’ve always been so envious of people with good figures! If I ever get the chance, I’d love to bathe with Dame Rachel!”
“Th-that will absolutely never happen.”
Rachel’s face finally ripened into a full-blown radish red.
Deep down she had always known her figure was feminine—and for that very reason she had never been pleased about it.
To a knight, voluptuousness was nothing but a hindrance.
Rachel ground her molars.
And then she had to ask.
“Just who is the one who wove all these delusions together? I want to know who that person is.”
I will grind them between these molars.
I will put a dent in that pathetic face with this fist.
With that vow of vengeance, Rachel asked Ariel.
“Well… it isn’t their real name.”
“That is fine. Someone must know the true identity behind the pen name.”
A nervous bead of sweat.
Faced with a Rachel who somehow seemed genuinely angry, Ariel hesitated a moment before quietly pleading her case.
“The pen name is BrokenMan.”
“BrokenMan… is it.”
Lady Knight Rachel, violated by someone she had never met, whose very existence she had never known.
There was only one way to settle this grudge.
Find them.
And kill them.
Rachel had just found one more reason to keep living in this world.
“Thanks for eating lunch with me! That was a truly excellent meal. I’m heading to the library now~!”
“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
“Okay!”
Ariel finished her meal in a hurry in the Great Hall and headed for the library, while I made my way toward the training grounds with Rachel.
Still holding the novel I was currently reading, The Path Walked by the Purple Knight.
“That book… do you truly intend to read it all the way to the end?”
“It’s fun, though? Learning more about the escort knight who lives under the same roof and sticks to me all day is a good thing for an employer too.”
“…It is nothing but a self-indulgent piece of writing built on delusions that have nothing to do with the truth.”
“Fanfiction needs a little delusion by nature. Still, thanks to it I learned about your tastes and hobbies, didn’t I? Especially the part about you enjoying Monster Cuisine since you were little—that was pretty welcome news.”
According to the novel, when Rachel wasn’t swinging a sword she mostly passed the time ‘writing’ and ‘knitting.’
She hadn’t denied it, which counted as confirmation.
For someone who had lived such a rough life, for a Rachel who seemed so far removed from anything cute or domestic, it was a surprisingly unexpected hobby.
And given that the original Elden’s memories contained no image of her indulging in those hobbies, she must have pursued them in pretty deep secrecy.
In a medieval era where information networks were inevitably thin, the fact that such high-grade details had been included suggested the fanfic had been written by a stalker who was genuinely obsessed with Rachel.
Of course, that was what fanfiction was.
A novel overflowing with fan love—and therefore inevitably overflowing with personal wishes and desires.
Fanfiction was a novel that crossed the boundary between delusion and reality, and because this was a medieval world that had thrown both copyright and human rights to the dogs, a stalking fanfic could sit proudly on display in the Grand Ducal castle’s library.
The author must have known the life Rachel had walked, known just how vicious and harsh that life had been, and so, wishing that the Rachel inside the novel at least would cherish and love herself, had created a bright, cheerful character.
As a single reader, and as the employer who kept Rachel as an escort knight, I thought that was a truly admirable sentiment.
Even though I had only read the early parts, I could already picture with painful clarity how fiercely Rachel had lived, how much bone-deep agony she must have endured to overcome her innate frailty.
And at the end of it all, even after earning the supreme honor of the title Purple Knight, she could never become a royal knight or the captain of the Grand Ducal Guard—simply because she was a woman, simply because her origins were lowly. That, too, left me feeling a little sorry for her.
In terms of pure renown, Rachel would not have been out of place leading any powerful organization, rather than serving as the escort knight of a declining baronial house.
Lee Junuw, who had possessed too much to lose and so had never been able to fully display his abilities, forced to live a desperate life in a basement room.
Of course his life was far too shabby to compare to Rachel’s, yet the sense that they shared certain corners of experience was probably no illusion.
I should treat her well.
With that resolve I arrived at the training grounds—and the moment I saw the eerie excitement gleaming on Rachel’s face as she turned around,
that resolve vanished without a trace.
“Prepare yourself. We begin immediately.”
…The way Rachel’s black eyes looked red was just my imagination… right?
Thud, thud, thud.
As expected, the way my master’s black eyes looked red had not been my imagination.
My master, who insisted that one could only teach after perfectly grasping a disciple’s level, had proposed bare-handed sparring, and I was currently stuck in the role of a punching bag.
The silver lining was that, unlike a bag hanging from a rope and getting thoroughly thrashed, I at least had arms and legs with which to defend myself.
On top of that, the time Deron’s fists had seemed painfully slow had not been an illusion—it turned out my dynamic vision really was that good.
I can see them.
Rachel’s fists and movements were visible, and I could even predict her next actions.
Maybe it was true that someone who had eaten meat ate it better, and someone who had fought fought better.
It seemed Elden Raphelion’s love of fighting and enjoyment of brawls had not been solely for the sake of venting.
Even a mindless, violent piece of trash of a delinquent could possess something called ‘talent’ and something he was ‘good at,’ and fighting had been the means of expressing it.
Of course bare-handed combat was not Rachel’s specialty, and she might simply have been showing leniency as a master in her first bout with a disciple. But if one considered the gap between a UFC champion and an amateur who scraped by on the streets, merely managing to defend myself already counted as a respectable showing.
Perhaps that was why.
The fists Rachel had been swinging lightly grew heavier, and the eerie excitement that had colored her face turned serious.
Matching her, I too engaged in earnest.
If I wanted to embark on the culinary journey I planned to take while wandering the continent, my master’s practical, condensed combat method was absolutely necessary.
A basic evaluation spar to gauge my fundamental skill was far more meaningful than the pointless final assessment of the engagement war.
Whoosh!
In a single instant, dozens of exchanges flew back and forth, and then Rachel stopped moving.
My entire body throbbed.
It was power that was genuinely hard to believe belonged to a woman.
“Your natural senses are excellent. Your fundamentals are solid as well.”
I had been so busy defending that my breathing was uneven, and because of that I had to plant a hand on my knee and pant hard.
My arms and legs were trembling from lack of exercise.
I might have natural talent, but I clearly needed work on stamina and strength training.
“Haa—haa—so I’m usable, then?”
“Yes. However, if your stamina is lacking, your concentration will falter, so it seems necessary to combine this with physical training. Your muscular strength is insufficient as well.”
“Right. Then…”
Whoosh!
I straightened my upper body while regulating my breath.
In that instant Rachel hooked my outer leg, and I went down hard.
Was she trying to teach me to prepare for surprise attacks?
Or was she taking out her frustration at not being able to thoroughly thrash the person who had mocked her by reading that bizarre fanfic?
The latter seemed closer to her intent, but that wasn’t the important part.
When a human faces crisis, they try to escape.
If escape is impossible, they try to minimize the damage somehow.
It was the most primitive instinct of a creature that hated pain, and the fact that I, as I fell, searched for something to grab in order to lessen the impact was a natural defense—an instinctive reaction.
The problem was—
the thing my hand found was Rachel’s chest.
I should consider myself lucky I hadn’t actually squeezed.
I should consider myself lucky I had avoided a situation where trying to dodge one crisis nearly created a far greater one.
I should consider myself lucky I had not become the perverted disciple who groped his master’s chest in their very first spar.
Yes. Better to just land on my ass.
Crash!
I hit the ground with the soft, yielding sensation still lingering unwillingly on my palm, and the contemptuous face of Rachel that filled my upward gaze was simply inevitable.
“…So the true purpose of this training was that all along?”
No.
“No. That’s not—”
You’re the one who suddenly threw me down.
“As expected…”
No.
“You truly are every inch the young master.”
I’m telling you it’s not.
I’m not that kind of person.
“Disgusting.”
…
…
…
But it was big, though.