Look at Me
The heat pounding through my skull hadn't cooled in the slightest — if anything, it roared hotter than before.
Still.
I hadn't completely thrown my reason to the winds.
It was just that—
Is there anything wrong with struggling, once in a while?
Enduring and enduring, holding back and holding back, over and over again.
…What had that ever gotten me, right up to this very moment?
The truth was, nothing.
Nothing at all.
All that remained were wounds. Scars.
Invisible ones, at that.
Which was exactly why my tormentors had never felt a shred of guilt, why they could repeat their cruelty again and again without end.
Patina, wooden sword in hand, glared at me with razor-sharp eyes.
She was just as worked up as I was — but the mere act of gripping a blade, even a practice one, had changed her whole bearing in an instant.
"Receive it."
Before that frost-laden voice could even reach my ears,
her silhouette scattered like smoke and vanished.
?!'
Reacting to what you see is too late.
Instinct took over — I tilted the sword gripped in both hands, setting it upright to my right.
Crack!
Wood met wood, and the collision rang out with startling force, striking my eardrums before anything else.
But more than the screech of it, the true impact transmitted through the wooden blade was far fiercer still.
"Ngh!"
"You're being driven back by this?! Grip your strength! Hold your ground with more fire than that!"
It was unfair, plain and simple.
She possessed the privilege of reinforcing her body with mana, wielding it as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
And me?
Like I said — meaningless.
A moment's resistance, a last desperate flail — that much was possible.
But that was all it amounted to.
Tap!
Even in the throes of her fury, it was blatantly obvious she was holding herself in complete control.
"Your reactions are too slow! Do you intend to simply stand there and take it?!"
"……."
A pointless provocation.
No one knew better than I did that heat in the head didn't summon strength out of nothing.
Besides—
…I had no trump card up my sleeve.
No secret technique to turn the tide.
'…….'
And yet.
None of that was reason enough to avoid the fight.
None of it granted justification for smothering my rage.
Was the weak — the feeble — simply obligated to shut their mouths, cast down their eyes, and swallow their humiliation whole?
To sit there like a mute, like a blind man, taking every absurd, unreasonable insult?
Every meaningless slander, every curse hurled their way — to simply bear it, and bear it, and bear it?
There is no freedom for those who do not resist.
Rights, even less so.
And I knew that all too well.
So why had I never fought back until now?
"……!"
…Because it was pointless.
Because struggling only ever brought greater loss.
My mind understood that. The arithmetic was painfully clear.
…So I closed my eyes, plugged my ears, gave up on thinking.
Just breathed. Just watched the sun set, the moon rise, the sun set again, the moon rise again.
Like a rotting dead tree. Like a weed withering where it stood.
Enduring in silence — that was the most I could do.
If there was a single hope left in all of it,
it was this:
…the vow that someday, I would leave this place.
A conclusion reached only after long years of piling one weight upon another.
That was the only hope I'd been granted.
My one, true lifeline.
"How long do you think you can hold out?! If you won't fight back! If you won't attack, your enemy will never retreat! Never turn away!"
Empty words.
A utterly useless sermon.
No — at this point it was nothing but slander, mockery, and contempt, all wrapped in one.
But so what? What of it?
Being beaten was familiar. The shame that came with it, more so.
In every mock duel, I was always the one sprawled in the dirt, floundering hopelessly.
My eyeline sinking low, and in that upward-glancing view — the countless gazes looking down on me, stepping over me, trampling me beneath them.
…I knew that sight far too well.
Which was why taking the hits, enduring them, collapsing with a practiced sort of grace—
was so familiar it had passed beyond habit into sheer revulsion.
Even that, I had adapted to.
At some point, I'd even swallowed it as a kind of survival tactic, accepting it meekly as one more lesson in how the world worked.
Crack!
The wooden sword I'd been blocking with gave way under the impact, splitting half through, fissures spidering across its length.
It hadn't shattered outright, hadn't been pulverized — and that was clearly her doing.
She was skilled enough to manage exactly that much.
"Take up a new sword."
"……."
Not a chance.
As if in defiance of her words, I flung the wooden sword away entirely.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"What? Bare hands too much for you?"
"Spare me the provocations that don't land. You saw how I looked just holding a sword — do you honestly believe this attitude of mine is reasonable?"
"Oh? And does the battlefield wait politely for you to find another weapon when your blade is shattered? What a magnificent knight you must be."
"……How far do you intend to fall?"
Fall? Like hell.
"What? Is that how your father taught you?"
"Cariel—! Honestly! There are things a person says and things a person does not!"
Why…
why was she angrier than I was?
It wasn't her being insulted.
And the target of that barb was none other than my father, of all people.
Cariel answered through clenched teeth.
"Wasn't it all just talk about fixing my head? Yours too? If that's what it means to be a knight, then go farm turnips for a living. Go chop firewood instead."
"You will… not regret this."
Ah.
Now I understood what it meant for flesh to crawl.
It sank in through the skin, slicing through the very muscle,
that fury of hers arriving all the way to the bone, heavy with weight.
And yet—
'That's it?'
It wasn't so impressive, actually.
One thing rang certain: this was no killing intent.
It was not the surge of will that sought to end someone's life.
But that it would offer neither forgiveness nor mercy was painfully self-evident.
A single stride, and the ground fissured beneath her foot like a torn spiderweb, shattering into a hopeless lattice.
Kicking off the earth, she came charging in, dragging a violent gust of wind in her wake.
At a speed and ferocity utterly beyond anything she'd shown moments ago.
And yet, somehow—
"?!"
I dodged. By a hair's breadth.
Her relentless follow-up combination, too.
Dodged by the slimmest margin. Barely evaded again.
The wooden sword slashed for my hair —
but it never even grazed my scalp, never shook my skull, let alone my brain.
It was a vicious blade tearing through the air with murderous force—
and it did not touch me.
It could not touch me.
Every single strike, off by a hair.
And that hair's breadth held, again and again.
Just barely.
Sometimes it struck skin — skin scraped raw and swollen, some of it flayed by the wake of each swing, cut and gashed, blood trickling steadily from the wounds.
But—
not one of them connected into anything fatal.
"……."
Perhaps this should have been moving.
Me — actually dodging Patina's assault with my bare body!
And it was in that moment that I understood.
Understood, with a desperation that crushed everything else.
A hideous screech of grinding iron echoed in my skull like a curse.
Skeee—!
Desolation.
That emotion took solid form and bore down on my heart.
For years upon years I had rolled through the mud and rolled again.
Striven, suffered, and suffered more.
Chewing over my regrets, turning even those into fuel; gripping the sword, wielding it with inferiority itself as my whip; channeling mana, circulating it, wracking my brain to fill in what I lacked and patch what fell short—
Truly, truly, I had tried every method there was.
And yet.
In the mere sliver of time since meeting the Demon King — since courting death, making my vow, and shouldering it—
…I was somehow holding my own against an assault I'd once believed I could never contest in a lifetime.
'Ha!'
Of course.
A counterattack was impossible.
Shifting to the offensive was flatly out of the question.
Even now, I was balancing on a tightrope with one foot, teetering beyond all measure.
The endless rain of arrows fell without mercy, my whole body their target.
Until I, the target, fell.
They poured down without pause, skewering me through.
And more.
That calamity of armored riders surging in like a sandstorm, like a tidal wave — no bare body could absorb such torment.
But even that was not the end of it.
Sometimes I was caught beneath the feet of great monsters, trampled flat.
Sometimes a pack of beasts swarmed me and tore at my flesh while I lay sprawled, ripping it away piece by piece.
Sometimes armed soldiers fell upon me from every side, cutting, stabbing, bludgeoning—
Dying, dying, dying again and again.
In the end, all I had ever gained was—
…the struggle to survive a little longer. Nothing more.
But that alone had a clear limit.
'Dodging alone won't be enough.'
I knew.
I knew it far too well.
But the Demon King had declared he would teach me no way out.
Find it yourself, he'd said. Forge your own path.
'I told you you'd regret it. Why didn't you just take the offer when I was being generous?'
Did I regret it?
Or did I resent him?
'Don't make me laugh.'
Regret — I couldn't say when it began, but at the very least, up to this exact moment, everything my life had passed through had been regret.
There had been a time, long ago, when I'd fancied myself special, believed I was destined for something enormous.
Even that was now a faint afterimage, half-forgotten.
In the end, reality was wretched and cheap and sordid,
and all that remained to me was—
bent, broken, and flung aside—
my pathetic, stubborn pride.
Crack!
"?!"
As if it had been waiting for precisely this moment.
The wooden sword thrust straight for me — and Cariel opened his palm wide to receive it.
The tip punched clean through his palm, and then through the back of his hand beyond it — and in that instant, he pushed his palm forward, seizing the wooden blade in an iron grip.
"Wh-what are you—?!"
"Bite down, damn you."
Before any warning could even be given,
his other fist was already swinging for Patina's face.
Crack!
"Ugh!"
A knight, after all, does not release their blade even in death.
"Are you… in your right mind?!"
No answer was needed.
The first punch had landed because she'd been caught off guard; the second would not.
Judging it too late to block with her remaining hand, she improvised — catching the fist with her forehead.
The outcome was inevitable: Cariel's weakened punch scattered like seawater breaking against a reef, dissolving into wreckage.
But.
Unbroken, Cariel swung again.
"Kuh?!"
Her gaze wavered, darting this way and that.
Bewilderment — or perhaps fear — at what he'd done to his own hand.
That flicker of hesitation granted Cariel two, three openings to strike.
But that was all it granted.
The instant's advantage neutralized, Patina seized his fist with her one free hand.
And here came the next surprise.
Holding the ruined fist — and then letting it go — she turned his own opening against him, hooking her fingers into his gaping, startled mouth,
and flipped his entire body clean over.
'You've…'
got to be kidding me.
What even was this?
He seemed to pitch forward along the pull of her body — but his whole frame twisted mid-fall, and he slammed into the ground.
The impact that raced up from his back drove straight through his organs, stabbing into his heart, his lungs.
"Kehak!"
Breath stopped dead, and consciousness blurred in an instant.
It was, in a word, a catastrophe.
His left palm was a ruin, skewered by the wooden sword; worse, the swing had twisted his arm at the joint until it was crushed beyond recognition.
The crash into the ground left him struggling even to breathe, and his right hand — pounded, crushed, and bitten broken — was a mess down to the fingers and wrist.
And yet — how wretched a thing it was, being so accustomed to pain.
Even through all of it, he writhed and strained to push himself up.
Using the wooden sword lodged through his palm as a brace, using even his mangled left arm's broken joint as a prop, he fought to raise his body—
and an agony no gritted teeth could withstand came crashing in all at once.
"Aaargh—!"
Rolling on the ground, thrashing, flailing—
and still, he did not give up.
Absurdly.
Here, in the depths of this agony,
I — ridiculously, unbelievably—
…was drowning in a liberation I had never once known, so vast it felt as though my eyes might spill over with water, past moisture, into a rushing current.
The sky was dark, the moon itself forlorn — but the starlight was brilliant.
The air was cold yet burning, my whole body felt as though it were ablaze, and even the wind that blew carried only a faint tremor.
And yet, in this moment—
for this one moment — I felt no resentment, no hatred, no injustice of any kind.
'Ah….'
With a soft patter, something — blood, or flesh, or fragments — fell in an unbroken stream from my left hand to the earth.
And still, not at all—
no fear, no regret, no grief.
I sank into a base, low satisfaction.
…Had I gone mad long ago?
Or—
"Right now! What in the! What do you two think you're doing?!"
At that voice, my mind snapped back to clarity.
"Patina! Cariel! You two… what on earth is…."
Ah.
Mother.
Look at me.
I did it.
That genius — the youngest ever admitted into the very knight order our father commands.
I—
'I landed a hit on her. Didn't I?'
Her expression — my mother's — crumpled into something truly desolate.
At the far edge of my vision, Patina's face had bled into the same hopeless ruin.
And at that—
quietly, gleefully, I laughed.
Smiles and laughter spilled out of me of their own accord.
I couldn't hold them back.
Even the pain felt delightful; even the agony, a gift.
But this rapture would be brief, wouldn't it.
In the end, all of this would lead to their condemnation — of worthless, wretched me.
And what of it?
Ah — it didn't matter.
After all, I—
…would soon vanish from this place forever.
Wrapped in an inexplicable relief, in a sense of fulfillment,
I finally, at long last, let myself laugh out loud — freely, with my whole chest.
That night, of all nights,
the moonlight I looked up at was forlorn and thin.
But the starlight spread wide across the heavens, more brilliant than anything.