The Lord of the Forest
The Lord of the Forest.
It was a king among monsters, born only rarely in the Red Forest beyond the Great Forest. Its mere existence bound together countless beasts that would otherwise never have gathered, bending them to its will and driving them like an army. For that reason the Lord of the Forest was at once the greatest threat the Great Forest could produce and the signal flare of all-out war.
"The Lord of the Forest..."
Keiser murmured the words, and his face hardened. He drummed his fingers against the desk for a moment. Then his presence flared, sharp and sudden, just once.
"So the day has come at last."
He turned toward the window. His eyes were fixed on the distant southern sky.
"Will you go yourself?"
I asked because, until now, he had remained shut inside the manor. He answered with a snort.
"What a pointless question. I am master of the Blue Wall, the line that meets the Great Forest. If not me, then who?"
With that, the duke declared he would ride to the wall in person. A true war was about to begin.
"I'll go as well."
If that was the case, I had no intention of being left behind. Keiser smiled, plainly pleased. There had been a time when even a shove at his back could not send this son toward a battlefield. Now the boy was walking into one of his own accord, and the pride of it showed.
"Good. You are a member of House Roenheim, and a knight besides. The Blue Wall is a battlefield you are meant to face. I grant you permission to die there."
Dying was not part of my plan, but I nodded all the same. Keiser looked away from me and back to the soldier.
"Who discovered that the Lord of the Forest had appeared?"
"Lady Serena, Your Grace. She scouted deep into the Red Forest and came face to face with it herself."
"Tsk. I told her not to set foot inside the Red Forest..."
At the report, Duke Keiser clicked his tongue.
"Casualties?"
"The young lady was wounded, but her life is not in danger. However... roughly half the force that went out on reconnaissance never made it back."
"As I thought. She overreached, and all we have to show for it is the loss of good knights."
He rebuked his daughter's recklessness, saying that simply tracking the monsters' movements would have told them soon enough that the Lord of the Forest had appeared.
"Anything else to report?"
"The beastkin inside the Great Forest are refusing to cooperate. Our knights and soldiers have made contact, but so far only a handful have agreed to accept our protection."
"Even now, their stubbornness hasn't changed."
Keiser muttered it on a short sigh. After taking a few more reports from the soldier, he turned back to me.
"Lucas, I will give you the rank of company commander. Go to the Wind Fortress, where Serena is."
Along with a title that was hardly much of one, he ordered me to reinforce them.
"Understood."
I nodded. For a moment I had thought I would be going as a common knight again. Even this was more than I could have hoped for. A company commander's rank, at least, was a post that could carry out operations on its own. And if I was going anyway, I liked that the front I was being sent to was Serena's.
From what I had heard, she spent almost none of her time simply holding the wall. She was forever stirring things up inside the Great Forest. For someone who needed to know what was happening in there, she was as good a source of intelligence as I could ask for.
"I'll depart tomorrow."
Afraid the duke might change his mind, I locked the schedule in on the spot. He had no idea what I was thinking and only gave a light nod.
The empire's southern border, where it met the Great Forest, was divided into three great sectors. At the center, the Blue Wall guarded the broadest stretch of open plain. To the east, the Wind Fortress held the narrow passage between sheer cliffs and deep ravines that ran out of the Great Forest. And to the west, the Moss Fortress stood against the fathomless swamplands.
I was bound for the Wind Fortress, the one Serena was said to be holding.
"Oh, right. I heard the Margrave of Auswald, up in the north, has passed away."
On the road to the fortress, Greg spoke as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
The death of the northern margrave. At the news that marked the true beginning of Crius Saga, my eyes flew open.
"He has? Exactly when?"
"The date... about a month ago, my lord."
A low sound escaped me. Sooner would have been better. Unfortunately, the empire's north lay as far from the south as it was possible to get, and word took just as long to travel. Which meant that in the timeline of Crius Saga I knew, the main scenario had already been underway for a full month.
"And the margraviate?"
"His heir, Sir Dechard, is to succeed him."
It was the same course of events I remembered, and I nodded. Then a question struck me.
"How do you even know that?"
As far as I knew, Greg was a man who understood nothing but the sword. Noble gossip was beyond him. He had been oblivious even to the knights living right beside him. How was someone like that bringing up news from the distant north?
The reason was simpler than I expected.
"I've been gathering reports separately from adventurers who pass news along. Sir Walter said you take a keen interest in this sort of thing, my lord."
It was true that I had asked Walter for information like this more than once. He had said he would sit Greg down and hand the work over before he retired. I had not expected him to be so thorough about even the small things, and the care of it caught me off guard.
"That's right. So keep at it."
"Yes, my lord. Only..."
Greg hesitated, which was unlike him.
"What is it?"
"Well, this is something I heard from the other knights, but... they say you're afraid of Lady Serena. Is that true?"
Afraid of Serena? I sifted through Lucas's memories, and sure enough, it was. Unlike his younger brother Edwin, Serena had never, not for a single moment, been weaker than Lucas. Nor did she have Edwin's easygoing temper. In front of her, at least, Lucas had been forced to rein in his bullying, if only a little.
"That's all ancient history."
Having glimpsed those memories, I left it at that. Greg looked briefly surprised, then nodded.
"Well... you're incredible yourself, my lord, but she's especially strong, even among the knights."
That much was true. Lady Serena was Lucas's older sister, and a four-star knight standing on the very threshold of Sword Master. Lucas had two more siblings besides Serena and Edwin. Even counting all of them, no one surpassed her talent.
"Speaking of which, do you know where Edwin went?"
"I heard he went to the Moss Fortress in the west."
I nodded. For the record, the other two were nine and ten. They were attending the academy in the Imperial Capital, so they were not on the Roenheim lands just now.
"Ah, there! I can see the wall."
We had been walking and talking, and at last our destination came into view. On one side, a cliff sheared upward as if it meant to touch the sky. On the other, a ravine dropped away so deep the bottom was lost. Between them stood a gray wall, barring the passage.
A low, eerie gale moaned without end. True to the name Wind Fortress, the wind never stopped.
"Who goes there!"
A soldier at the gate shouted toward us.
A short while later, a soldier guided me inside the fortress.
The first thing I had to do here was meet Serena, who held the authority of the fortress's lord. I had arrived as a new assignment, and a transfer report was in order. But the moment I reached the council chamber where she was supposed to be, a racket came from within.
"They refused the demand."
"Again?"
"Yes. At this rate, I don't think persuasion is going to work."
"Ha! Those idiots!"
Someone slammed a fist down on the table. That was when I opened the door.
The razor edge in the room turned on me all at once, a volley of stares like arrows.
"And who are you?"
The woman in the highest seat demanded it of me.
Golden hair, lavish and unmanaged, falling in disarray. Features that were beautiful, and yet carried the wildness of a beast. And beneath all of it, a pulse of mana so fierce it raised the hair on my neck. There was no mistaking her. This was the Serena from Lucas's memories.
Wounded, she was wrapped in bandages here and there, and the presence rolling off her was that of an injured predator. I opened my mouth the way Lucas once had when he faced her.
"It's Lucas, Sister."
"Lucas? You're saying you're Lucas?"
Serena's brow knotted hard. She looked like a woman with no time to spare who had just been handed a joke that wasn't funny. Had I lost so much weight she couldn't recognize me?
"And why would that brat come here?"
"...This is a letter from Father."
Rather than explain my arrival piece by piece, I handed her the letter Keiser had written himself. It held the account of me, of course, along with the duke's instructions. Serena took it with a look of distaste.
Riiip.
Instead of using her injured hand, she caught the envelope in her teeth and tore it open any which way. It came apart as if a dog had worried it. She flung the scraps aside and began to read.
"Tch..."
From the very first line she clicked her tongue, sick of it already. No doubt Keiser's rebuke was written there. When she had read the letter through, she looked at me again.
"I get the gist. But you're a knight?"
Her eyes raked over me, searching.
"A man without even an aura core, calling himself a knight... wait."
The mockery drained out of her gaze, and something sharper took its place. So the genius of the ducal house was not an empty reputation after all. She seemed to have noticed that I was not quite like the other knights.
"Ha. Interesting. You've changed, haven't you? What did you do to yourself?"
"I only trained hard."
"Training, my ass. If you don't want to talk, then don't. More to the point, why are you here?"
"To fight, obviously."
"Yeah? Then have a match with me."
That was not what I had meant. She was already looking around for a wooden sword, ready to spar on the spot.
"My lady! This is when you should be recovering from your wounds."
The knights around her rushed in to stop her. Even to my eye, a spar with bandages still wrapped around her arms and legs looked like a bad idea.
"More importantly, what were you discussing? It sounded like there was a problem."
I turned the talk back to the meeting already underway. First I needed to understand the situation at the Wind Fortress. At that, Serena's expression soured all over again, and she gave one of the knights a quiet look.
"It's the beastkin."
"Beastkin?"
Beastkin were exactly what the name suggested: beasts and humans mixed together, the classic demi-humans of fantasy. Some of them lived in tribes of their own inside the Great Forest, and they were not enemies of House Roenheim. The Great Forest held the demonkin as a common foe, and both sides had kept to the unspoken rule of not meddling in each other's territory.
But.
"The Great Forest where the beastkin live is about to become a battlefield. His Grace, Duke Keiser, in his mercy, wishes to bring them into the fortress and protect them, but..."
"Those idiot beastkin say they absolutely will not abandon their villages."
Serena added it, irritated. From the sound of it, they had already warned the beastkin of the war several times and tried to persuade them, and failed.
"So what do they intend to do?"
"Defend the villages with their own strength, they say. Ha! What a joke."
Serena snorted. Her words were rough in places, but they were not wrong. Left alone, these were monsters enough to bring the empire down. On a battlefield between such beasts and the ducal house, a handful of beastkin protecting anything was close to impossible.
Serena was clearly frustrated with beastkin who seemed to be begging for their own deaths. I, on the other hand, understood where they stood. I knew the distrust they held toward humans.
Crius Saga had quests tied to any number of its NPCs, and among them were quests concerning the beastkin. Skim those, and the past was plain enough. More than once, the beastkin had trusted humans, been betrayed, and paid for it in blood. It had nothing to do with House Roenheim. Even so, the beastkin of the Great Forest, who had little dealings with humankind, carried a bedrock distrust of people because of it. That was why they could not take the ducal house at its word when it promised to protect them.
"And what were you planning to do with them if you took them in?"
I asked after the intent as well. Serena answered lightly, as if I ought to have known.
"Their five senses are sharper than a trained knight's. If we could join forces, even sending them out to scout would be a tremendous help."
So it was about fighting together after all. The motive was not especially impure.
"Then I'll go."
And so I stepped forward. At my words, Serena's eyes fixed on me, unblinking, as if she were trying to see exactly what I was after.