A Midday Date (1)
The City of Opportunity, Cambria.
Inside the carriage bound for Cambria, Najin watched the scenery flow past. Languid sunlight poured down. With autumn giving way to winter, the streets lay thick with fallen leaves dyed in every color imaginable.
Those are fallen leaves?
"Hm? What do you mean by that… Ah."
Najin's murmur. Merlin trailed off as she grasped the meaning a beat late. A boy who had lived his entire life in the underground city of Atman could never have experienced autumn, nor could he ever have seen a fallen leaf.
Najin simply stared out the window in silence.
New things, every last one of them.
Just when he thought he had grown used to something, something else entirely new would leap out. The blue of the sky, the green of the fields, the riot of colored leaves… the surface world was painted in hues the underground city had never known.
It was wondrous. And beautiful.
For a moment the boy's eyes drank in the unfamiliar landscape. Then a cold sunset settled into those same eyes, and they narrowed. Clearly, wandering the outside world was enjoyable for him.
Enjoyable enough to let his guard down, anyway.
The battle with Kaufman. Najin recalled the moment the man had ambushed him. One small mistake and he would have died right there. At the same time, he thought: he had grown far too soft.
He had forgotten that pursuers were after him—that he could be hunted anywhere, at any time.
In the effort to grow accustomed to the strange and new, he had forgotten the most important thing. If Ivan had been watching, he would have clicked his tongue for certain. He should never have done it. He should never have lowered his vigilance in the first place. The wariness he had carried when he first left the underground city had diluted far more than he realized; Najin felt it keenly now.
Ridiculous, isn't it.
Najin gave a bitter smile.
I haven't even reached Sword Seeker yet, let alone Sword Master, and here I am catching my breath.
Merlin stayed silent.
She had started to say that wasn't true, but the words never reached him. In Najin's mind the image of Kaufman's arrows piercing him…
and the image of Yuel Razian, the Church's Executioner, raising her sword, were burned in far too deep.
When Yuel Razian had unleashed her killing intent, Najin had seen a vision of his own head being severed. Senses stretched to their absolute limit had shown him the future. Even after seeing that future, of course, there had been no way to answer it.
Death. An utterly simple death.
The battle with Kaufman. The encounter with Yuel.
Those events had been more than enough to wake him to what he had forgotten—namely the very simple fact that his head could roll anywhere, at any time.
"Haaah…"
Najin let out a long breath.
I heard the Holy Light Church has a Lighthouse Keeper—someone at the level of a Sword Master.
"Yeah. There is."
Will that one come to kill me?
"No. That's impossible."
Merlin cut him off flatly.
"The Lighthouse Keeper can't move. He's a special existence; the moment he stirs, the stars take notice. If the Lighthouse Keeper moves, the entire world will be watching you and him."
And if that happens, Merlin continued,
"the instant you draw Excalibur on that stage, everything flips. The Holy Light Church tries to kill the wielder of Excalibur. There's no way the Lighthouse, the Church's principal god, wouldn't understand what that single sentence means."
The Lighthouse Keeper was the equal of an apostle of the Lighthouse, the master of the Holy Light Church. The moment it became known that the Lighthouse had moved its own apostle to crush the owner of Excalibur…
"the stars would be given a pretext to intervene."
"The descent of a constellation has fairly complicated conditions, but in this case the conditions for a star to descend upon the inland would be met."
Intervention by the stars.
It meant turning the entire world into an enemy.
"That would be bad for you and for the Holy Light Church both. That place would become a battlefield of the stars."
Stars that sought to kill Arthur's successor, and stars that sought to protect Arthur's successor—war between them.
"There is no victor in that war."
"If you reached the realm of a Sword Master and possessed a star of your own, maybe… but not as things stand now."
Church and Najin alike would simply be destroyed side by side.
"But the Church would be the first to fall."
What was certain was that the Church's ruin would come faster than Najin's. Losing everything it had built. Merlin said the Lighthouse would never choose that path.
"I still don't entirely understand this situation, to begin with."
"I've been thinking it was the Church underlings acting on their own, but by now even he has to know, right?"
Knowing, and still intervening in this affair.
Merlin let out a hollow laugh at the thought.
"In a situation where he should be making excuses about independent action and scrubbing the underlings clean, why do something like this?"
"Is he trying to pick a fight with the Round Table? Some idiot with a mere eight stars who's lost in religious games? The Lighthouse I know isn't a star with that kind of guts."
Listening carefully to Merlin, Najin spoke.
In the end, what I have to do is the same.
The goal he had to keep in sight did not change.
Aside from the Lighthouse Keeper, the Church had no other powerhouses on the level of a Sword Master. What remained were only those comparable to Sword Seekers.
Ivan had said as much from the beginning.
Once you reach the realm of a Sword Seeker, the Church will no longer be able to ignore your existence, and they will come to the negotiating table. The situation had shifted somewhat, but the core of the plan had not changed.
I reach the realm of a Sword Seeker.
Not merely grasping a fragment, but the next step beyond.
To reach Sword Seeker, one had to completely dismantle one's sword aura and reconstruct it. Only through that process could one obtain a form of aura optimally shaped to hold a mindscape.
Where did he stand now?
He had touched a fragment, yet he had not achieved the reconstruction of his aura. Against a complete Sword Seeker he would still be pushed back. Relying on lucky breaks the way he had against Kaufman Teosis would be difficult.
"I am only the beginning."
"Plenty more will come looking for you until you're sick of it."
Kaufman had said exactly that.
More people would come hunting his neck, and he would sometimes have to steel himself for fights against many at once. Among them would likely be those as strong as Kaufman—or stronger.
This would not do.
He had to reach the realm of a Sword Seeker.
Even one day sooner.
There were quite a few privileges granted to Red-rank adventurers, and among them was a private training room.
Private training rooms operated under the management of the Central Guild. Available only to adventurers of Red rank and above, the facilities were so excellent that even knights belonging to noble houses were said to covet them.
And of course, a place where one could train freely without worrying about prying eyes or the leakage of techniques was hard to find anywhere else. Find a good forest, and within a few days it would become a popular training spot thronged with people—that was the usual story.
So adventurers of Red rank and above made frequent use of the private rooms, and they would often chat in the lounge-cum-corridor where the training-room doors stood in a row.
"So, like I was saying."
And today.
The gazes of the adventurers gathered in the lounge were fixed on a single training room. They kept stealing glances at one tightly shut door as they continued their idle talk.
"He's been at it since yesterday?"
"Yesterday? My friend, it's been a whole week already."
A middle-aged adventurer whose back was covered in scars let out a dry laugh.
"You know I use the training hall every dawn, right?"
"I know. You've been saying you go tear some muscle before reporting to your mercenary company for years now."
"Right. So normally when I show up at dawn, I'm the first one there. Other guys start trickling in after an hour or two."
"And?"
"And for the past week, that young man has always been there first. The light in that training room is always on. Once I came an hour earlier than usual—he was still there."
An adventurer who had been eavesdropping on the middle-aged man's words cut into the conversation.
"That guy's at it at night too, you know?"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The way he smashes things—boom, boom. I use the room right next door and it's driving me crazy. Whatever he's swinging so violently, just the sound is enough to give you chills."
There was no need to ask what that sound was. It was still coming through right now. Beyond the firmly closed door, the endless noise of something being broken and split kept ringing out—even through the soundproofing.
"For a whole week?"
"Seems that way."
"One hell of a stubborn bastard."
The adventurers clicked their tongues.
They themselves were powerhouses who had reached a certain level, and they knew what it meant to throw yourself into training. On days when you wanted to empty your head with practice, you might bury yourself in the training hall for a day or two…
but you didn't usually do it for an entire week.
And never that violently.
"What's the name."
"Ivan, I'm pretty sure."
"The one who recently made Red rank…"
The adventurers rolled the name of the youth using that training room around on their tongues. He was a young man who had been making a name for himself in the adventurer city of late; there was no one who didn't know of Ivan.
So why was that youth doing this?
"Any reason he's training like that?"
"What else would it be? You know, that recent thing."
"Kaufman, that old man…"
White-rank adventurer Kaufman Teosis.
His death had been announced, and Cambria was in an uproar. Meanwhile Ivan, who had jumped into the same mission, had been locked inside the training room for over a week.
The adventurers could only vaguely guess that Kaufman's death had left some great impression on him.
Creeeak.
While they were whispering among themselves, the training-room door opened. A rush of hot air billowed out as Najin stepped into the corridor. Wiping away sweat, he filled an empty water jug to the brim and headed straight back into the training room.
And in that brief moment, the adventurers saw.
Through the open crack of the door—Najin's training room.
It was covered in sword scars.
Traces of a blade swung in frenzy blanketed the entire chamber. Ceiling, walls, floor—and the central target wall had been gouged out in a massive crater.
When you recalled that the caretakers cleaned and restored the place every single day, and that the central wall was built of ore famous for its hardness, it was genuinely astonishing. The adventurers fell silent for a moment, at a loss for words.
Then someone spoke.
"Madman."
No one disagreed.
The sight they had glimpsed beyond the open door was not a landscape any sane person would create.
Late evening. Only after midnight did Najin finally leave the training room. Walking through the cold air, he thought: grab a light meal, catch a short nap, then head straight back out.
Eavesdropping on that monologue, Merlin couldn't hold it in any longer.
"Stop it already. How long are you going to keep this up?"
I have to reach Sword Seeker, don't I?
"I know. I know, but…"
Merlin sighed.
"I get that you're in a hurry, but this isn't helping. It's not a realm you can reach just by training like a brute."
It'll still help, though.
"You're driving me crazy, seriously."
Even while walking home and talking with Merlin, Najin kept every nerve drawn infinitely sharp.
So he could respond the instant an assassin came.
In the training room, and even when he slept, he held his sword in his arms… which meant he was not truly resting at all.
It was the same as when he had first left the underground city.
Watching the wariness that had loosened for a while now surge up even higher than back then, Merlin clicked her tongue. At this rate he would break. But it was not a habit that could be fixed in a day or two.
Najin.
The boy born and raised in the underground city.
Even among the discarded who fell into that underground city, he had grown up in the alleyways of children who had been discarded again. The nature of a hunting dog did not disappear easily.
It had been the same when he worked as Ivan's hunting dog. Every time he tasted a minor mistake, a threat to his life, approaching death—Najin would drive his body to pathological extremes to hone his senses to a razor's edge.
That was what had kept him alive.
That was what had let him defeat the strong.
Those intense experiences from childhood never left Najin's body. He might forget them for a while, but he could never let them go. Watching the memories that flickered through Najin's mind now, Merlin sighed.
Clink.
Even so, Najin dozed with his sword in his arms, and the moment he opened his eyes in the early dawn he headed straight for the training room.
"Busy even before the sun's up, I see."
Najin stopped walking.
The streets of early dawn, still dark before sunrise.
"You're a hard man to catch a glimpse of."
Someone was sitting on the bench in front of the training hall. She rose from her seat and pushed back the deep hood of her robe. Light brown hair fluttered in the wind.
"Honestly, would it kill you to come find me first once in a while? I told you to come back safe, didn't I? So when you do get back, the least you could do is drop by to say you made it, right?"
Grumbling, she crunched through the fallen leaves underfoot as she walked toward him. Coming to a stop in front of Najin, she narrowed her bright yellow eyes to slits.
"Don't you think so, Najin?"
A name whispered only after she confirmed no one else was around.
"What brings you out at a dawn like this? The caravan—"
"Name."
"…Dieta."
"Does there have to be some special reason for me to come by? It's not like we're that distant."
Dieta shrugged.
"Nothing major."
She took hold of Najin's arm and tugged.
"Come somewhere with me."
"Pardon?"
"I said come with me for a bit."
Dieta hauled him along by force. He could have shaken her off easily, yet Najin found he could not. The place she dragged him to held a single carriage.
In front of the carriage, Dieta twisted a lock of her hair around her index finger.
"…It's a date invitation."
Even saying it herself seemed to embarrass her; her face had gone bright red.