The Hero of the Steppe (1)
"You're back."
Orthros didn't even answer. He just waved Lycaon off — a gesture that said, plainly, not now.
He looked as though even the seconds spent on conversation were too costly to spare, already sinking back into thought and calculation.
Replaying the spar, no doubt.
Lycaon confirmed that Orthros had returned without a drop of blood on him, and nodded to himself. The kid would be unharmed, then.
That brat isn't a fighter you can put down without taking a scratch.
He possessed a technique so clean it was almost unheard of — and, at the same time, the tenacity of a beast that bit down and refused to let go.
Back when the other gladiators still hadn't recognized the boy's true worth, someone had asked Lycaon what he made of the kid's skill.
"Lycaon. You know, at first I figured he was just some brat with ridiculous luck."
A foolish opening. The kid hadn't survived by luck. He'd survived because he'd succeeded in killing the people in front of him.
"But that luck of his is still going, isn't it? Hey, Lycaon. What's your take?"
"Eight years. Maybe even sooner."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"By then, that kid will have killed every last person here."
Yes. That was what he'd said.
"Here... like this..."
Orthros had apparently forgotten Lycaon was even watching. He launched into his drills at once, muttering like a madman.
"No — sharper..."
Orthros's spear moved as though it were dueling someone's shadow.
"More precise..."
Whose shadow? There was nothing to wonder about.
"It'll be hard to reproduce."
Lycaon was skeptical. The boy's sword was a blade you couldn't even invent in a dream.
It swung as if it might come apart at any moment — and yet, in the same breath, it answered with exquisite precision. A sword that excelled at the parry, that struck where you least expected, and that sometimes, even when you saw it coming, you still could not stop.
A blade that held terror and beauty in a single stroke. It resembled the beasts Lycaon had slaughtered in such numbers.
Any gladiator worth the name would recognize the true worth of that sword.
Kid. Which way will you point that blade?
"I don't know."
It didn't matter right now. Lycaon wasn't a man who had drowned himself in hatred the way Orthros had. What came first was the plan. He looked up at the summer sun.
"I'd thought of this as nothing but a cold, unwelcoming land. But even here, the summer sun isn't half bad."
Then the plan would proceed without a hitch.
"Come closer. Helios. Sol."
Dry the waters of the salt lake.
Lay the salt bare, and let those who covet it turn upon one another.
Some things could only live if there was a war.
The sons of the Empire would live by that war.
With Bia's help, Vesta was replaying the fight from earlier when she spoke up.
"I don't understand it."
He didn't ask from which angle. There would be no shortage of things she couldn't understand.
"I suppose that's fair."
"That spearman was a madman. Maybe because he's carrying two people's worth of hatred all by himself."
"He was completely insane, that man."
"When a person holds hatred that deep, they usually lose their reason and just charge in."
"There are people who get calmer when they're angry, though, aren't there?"
Bia conceded the point. But Orthros's behavior, she said, couldn't be explained by that alone.
"If it were me, I would have used every means I had. We would have settled it here."
Poison. Hired blades. Whatever it took.
Listening to her, Vesta realized something. The day of the orc raid — if Arin hadn't made it out alive that day, Bia would have hunted those orcs down by any means necessary, without a single scruple. A wind of blood would have swept across the Steppe.
"He finally met the enemy he'd been waiting for all this time, and he didn't even fight to the death. He tested his skill in a spar, then turned around and left as if it were the most natural thing in the world. How am I supposed to understand that?"
"Because he doesn't just want to kill me. He wants to kill me for certain."
"I don't know about that."
She probably finds it hard to accept.
Vesta's own attitude, she added, was just as incomprehensible.
"You should have killed him here."
If Vesta's strength hadn't been enough, they should have finished it with hers. Bia said it without hedging.
Shouldn't they have tied off that knot already?
"Are you planning to go back to the Empire?"
Do you want to become a slave again? Do you want to fight until you die? That was what she was asking.
He didn't think of it that way. If you asked him whether he wanted to live or die, Vesta wanted to live. He didn't know what he wanted to become — but he knew he didn't want to go back to being a slave.
I'm so sick of being a slave.
He'd been raised from birth under a fate that said he would be a gladiator-slave. He'd fought as a slave. He'd lost comrades, and sometimes he'd been the one to cut them down. That was how he'd come to accept his identity as a gladiator.
He'd never been grateful for that fate, of course. It was simply an identity forged by living — by surviving.
But—
"It's just... that's where we came from."
"No."
Bia didn't agree. She was a woman of the Steppe, a centaur who lived a life freer than anyone. She didn't place much weight on where you'd come from.
What mattered was where you were going. And where you arrived. Yes — the destination. The place you meant to reach. She could not accept a life lived for the sake of becoming a slave, or dying in a fight.
He was grateful she'd said that. Truly, with all his heart.
The way you live is beautiful.
"Bia."
Vesta spoke her name in a low voice.
"......"
The arena was narrower than the Steppe, but it had a beginning and an end. It had life and death. That was why it stood as a world unto itself.
Just as there was the way of the Steppe, there was the way of the arena. And if it was for the sake of avenging a brother who had died in that arena, you might well want to inherit that way. It was a gladiator's funeral — no different from the Steppe's sky burial, where you entrusted your body to the eagles.
Vesta, too, would return to the arena someday. That didn't mean he intended to become a slave. It didn't mean he intended to die there. Not at all.
On the contrary — he would go so that he would never live as a slave. To break the chains.
And then... I'll have to come back.
"...You're impossible."
"Pardon?"
"No. I understand what you mean. In the end, it comes down to whether you can accept it yourself or not."
Bia let out a sigh and finally conceded.
"Does that mean you understand?"
"No."
The answer was firm.
"How could I possibly understand? But I suppose I have to accept it. That's where it starts, after all."
Just as you respected the life of the Steppe.
"...Yes. That's where it starts."
Vesta and Bia looked at each other, and almost at the same moment, they both huffed a quiet laugh.
The more I look at him, the more fascinating this kid becomes.
Bia thought this as she matched her stride to Vesta's footsteps. For her, it was a pace that was practically standing still, so she had more than enough time to think.
The two of them were cutting across a path packed with centaur warriors. It wasn't something you could do with ordinary nerve. Even less so if you were a boy.
This one is different.
Vesta did look tense, but it was the kind of tension that warmed the body so it could fight at any moment. It wasn't fear. It hadn't been that long, but as far as Bia knew, his spirit had never once broken.
She remembered what Arin had told her.
"I thought I was done for — then that kid came charging in on horseback. Threw his hand right up in the air."
"...And then?"
"Couldn't make out what he was saying, but the orcs and I both looked over at him. Was he speaking Imperial? Anyway, it was like — look at me. Come at me."
A human? In front of dozens of orc cavalry?
That sat well outside Bia's common sense.
"And then?"
"Well. It was something else. He charged straight into the thick of them and — bang! — slammed right in. I think he was trying to throw off their bows..."
Arin had stopped mid-sentence and just looked at Bia's face.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"No reason."
When Bia kept pressing, Arin had shrugged and answered.
"Just reminded me of a certain young lady."
"The one who used to sparkle every time I told her a fairy tale. That little pony of a girl."
She meant Bia as a child.
Bia had grumbled about how long Arin was going to keep teasing her with that "young lady" business. But it wasn't something she could entirely dismiss.
A thought simply came to her.
If that little pony of a girl — that little girl — had met the boy earlier, she would have believed, without a shred of doubt, that he would become the kind of hero she'd seen in fairy tales.
What a ridiculous thought.
Yes. She really couldn't help thinking it.
"Bia."
"Yes?"
"I heard your childhood dream was to try on a dress."
"...It was not. What kind of ridiculous thing is that to say?"
"Was it? Ah, never mind. I must have misheard."
I need to get back. Fast.
The moment they returned to the tribe, Bia decided, she was going to thump Arin on the head.