Master and Disciple, Each Busy in Their Own Way
“The weather’s nice today.”
The dragon egg gave a great heave of its body—or whatever one was supposed to call the shell—in vigorous agreement. The fact that it could express itself this clearly raised the possibility that magic might let him communicate with the being inside…
“Sorry. I can’t use magic.”
Another firm roll.
“You’re saying it’s fine?”
Roll.
“What a good kid you are.”
Roll! Roll!
He would have liked to call Master Las and ask for a telepathy spell, but the fear that casting magic on a newborn—well, a newborn of sorts—might do some kind of harm, combined with the simple fact that Master Las was busy and he couldn’t just drag the man over for childcare, left him with no choice.
Just do what I can in this moment. That’s enough.
How to put it…
The future version of himself might not turn out to be as good a guardian as he imagined. Or he might never get around to saying the things he thought a child needed to hear. Don’t put your faith in the future. Don’t trust your future self too much. Don’t expect the future to be splendid and happy. If you think something needs doing later, do it right now, in the present. And if it truly can’t be done now, then don’t expect your future self to manage it either.
If someone asked him what the most valuable lesson of a mercenary’s life had been, those would be his answers. He had never once seen a mercenary actually follow through on something he’d sworn to do “someday.” Most of them died first, or never reached the fine future they’d pictured. And it wasn’t only mercenaries. The world betrayed people and piled trials on them as a matter of course; there was not a single rational reason to believe the future would treat you any better.
So while the egg was still an egg—
while he still hadn’t met its eyes—
there were things he could say freely, without the weight of a real face looking back at him. Words he might never manage once those eyes opened. Thinking of it that way, spending time like this didn’t seem so bad. It was a little like the way parents talked to a child still in the womb, wasn’t it?
“Come to think of it, I still haven’t given you a name.”
Roll! Roll! Roll!
The dragon egg reacted with explosive energy, the kind of furious tumbling that practically screamed, You’re only realizing that now?! An interpretation that probably wasn’t far from whatever the egg was actually feeling.
“Well, names are usually given after someone’s fully born.”
Roll! Roll! A long, insistent rattle of tumbling.
That one was probably, Enough excuses! Pick one already!
“All right, all right. I’ll decide right now.”
A single, subdued roll.
It settled down. Looks like he’d gotten that one right.
But a name…
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it. The problem was that nothing had ever struck him as the one. He could dredge up every name he knew and assemble a few that sounded decent enough, but none of them had that this is it feeling.
“How about Frey?”
A frantic, thrashing roll. Another.
“Okay, okay. Scratch that one.”
…It calmed down again.
He’d thought it was a perfectly good name. Granted, it was one of the most common names in the Empire… But surely the dragon egg hadn’t rejected it because it knew that? Hmm. That would be ridiculous.
“Angela?”
Furious rolling. More furious rolling.
“Priscilla?”
Same answer.
Every name he’d thought was halfway decent got flatly rejected by the dragon egg.
It stung a little.
He’d put real effort into those, and every last one had been turned down…
Well. There was still one left.
The problem was that the remaining name had a problem of its own.
It sounds too much like I just copied my disciple’s name.
When Sera came back and asked what the child’s name was, and he said that one, it would be far too obvious—Ah. Master was thinking about me a lot, wasn’t he? And that girl, for all she pretended otherwise, was sharp. In every way, that name was out.
But…
Roll~ Rattle-rattle! Roll~ Rattle-rattle!
The egg kept throwing its body around with frantic energy, broadcasting I’m in a huge hurry! Decide already! until, in the end, he had no choice but to say the only name left.
“Rhea…”
Just hearing it made you think of Sera, didn’t it? He’d come up with it himself and immediately set it aside as a bad idea… but nothing else remained. He couldn’t bring himself to offer some half-hearted placeholder either. For him, it was a choice with no other option. He prayed the dragon egg would reject it—
Roll~ Roll~ Roll~
“You like it?”
Roll!
…Unfortunately, it seemed to like it very much.
When it was broadcasting its delight that hard, he couldn’t exactly pretend not to notice.
What was he going to tell Sera later…
Maybe all he could do was pray she never found out?
Mercenaries never believe in gods—until the very end, when every last one of them starts looking for one.
He remembered the words an old man had once said to him on a battlefield, and looked up at the sky with a helpless expression.
A truly blue sky looked down on him.
“Mercenaries never believe in gods—until the very end, when every last one of them starts looking for one. But you… you seem different.”
An old man who had walked the path of the sword his entire life remembered a young man he had once met on a battlefield. The man with ash-gray hair had been a mercenary, and yet not a mercenary at all. Those eyes had been cleaner than any upright knight’s, the eyes of someone who refused to betray chivalry even in a filthy world and walked that road to the end. In truth, the reason he had not fled a duel that promised only defeat and death—and had crossed blades with him instead—had been to save even one more life.
Was that why?
In the end, he had not been able to cut that man down.
He, who had been called a madman of the sword, who was only satisfied when his blade was wet with blood.
Was that why?
Enough time had passed that forgetting would have been natural. And yet those eyes kept rising in his memory. Every time he saw them, he wondered: what do my own eyes look like? Compared to his…
They must be no better than filthy muck.
How had he ended up like this?
He could barely remember.
All he wanted now was for this life to end quickly.
And yet…
“Old man! I’m done!”
…he had somehow acquired a disciple.
A Hero candidate the Emperor had dumped on him without so much as asking. He would have preferred to ignore the whole thing, but one look at the scruffy little brat made looking away impossible. He knew perfectly well that the imperial bureaucrats would never properly care for a child just because someone had stuck a grand title like “Hero candidate” on them. So in the end, he had taken the child on.
Him—the one they called Sword Ghost—looking after a kid.
Even he had to admit it was a spectacularly bad fit.
Someone like that ash-haired mercenary should be the one raising a disciple. That would be proper. A sinner like me has no business… but I suppose this, too, is the fate the world decided.
A man as stained with sin as he was could never raise a disciple properly; he had no right to the role. Still, a lifetime spent swinging a sword meant there were things he could teach the child. Nothing more than how to kill people, really… but if the kid was a Hero candidate, that might be exactly the most useful thing of all.
“Big Brother!!!!!!!”
“What is it?”
He didn’t actually have a little brother. The bandits who had built a stronghold in the mountains around where he lived had simply decided to call him that. The mountain was a good place to live, so he had paid a casual visit to the outfit that already held the area, exchanged a few greetings—and from that day on, the boss and every bandit under him had started bowing and scraping and calling him Big Brother. Sword Ghost hadn’t bothered to stop them. They kept bringing him offerings of their own accord, which was convenient in any number of ways. The moment he drew his sword they would all fold anyway; they weren’t worth the attention.
“Big trouble! Big trouble!”
“What is it?”
“Well, you see—”
And that was why he let his guard down.
Thrust.
“…You.”
The bizarre dagger in the bandit boss’s hand—radiating a grotesque aura—sank into Sword Ghost’s abdomen.
“Heh heh. Even someone like the Sword Ghost drops his guard if you bow and scrape hard enough, eh?”
The bandit boss could handle aura, but he was still just a rural bandit chief. He was nowhere near the level that could fool a superhuman’s senses—and in fact he hadn’t. And yet Sword Ghost had been caught. A man of the superhuman realm. He understood why almost at once.
“A Demon Sword… ghk!”
“Heh heh. Demon Sword? It’s just a nice little blade that wants a bit of human blood. Look at me! A lowly bandit boss, and it’s made me this strong! All I did was feed it a little blood! Heh heh! It rewards you for what you give it—how is that not a kind sword?!”
No one knows exactly how they are made.
Some say they are forged by a blacksmith consumed with grudge. Others claim the demons send them from the Demon Realm as a calamity upon the human world.
Only one thing matters: every time a Demon Sword appears, rivers of blood flow through human history and mountains of corpses rise. There are no exceptions. The blade’s venom is so extreme it can drive even a priest mad with bloodlust.
And at the same time…
“Huh? What’s happening to my body?”
The bandit boss stared in confusion as his flesh began to wither like a mummy’s. Watching that hollow end, Sword Ghost offered a simple verdict.
“Idiot.”
A Demon Sword wants a strong swordsman. It always tries to latch onto the strongest person nearby. In the stronghold the bandit boss had been the strongest, so it had used him—but the moment the boss came looking for Sword Ghost, intending to pay him back for always looking down on him, the Demon Sword switched hosts from the bandit boss to Sword Ghost. The boss’s body was no longer needed, so it discarded him.
Shhhk.
The Demon Sword, which had been a dagger, changed shape.
It became the exact twin of the short sword in Sword Ghost’s hand.
Ting! Tiiing!
The Demon Sword flew at him. Sword Ghost swung his blade to meet it.
It won’t stop bleeding!
He tried to seal the wound with aura. It did nothing. A wound from a Demon Sword, most likely. Even a superhuman dies if he loses too much blood.
I can’t die like this!
The worst part was that a Demon Sword could possess a corpse. Once it did, it could use that corpse’s living abilities exactly as they had been. A corpse wouldn’t last long, of course… but if a Demon Sword took the body of a superhuman like Sword Ghost—
even a short time would be enough to carve rivers of blood and mountains of corpses.
Above all—
The first one to die would be my disciple!
That could not be allowed to happen.
No matter how many people’s blood already stained these hands—
he would not let them be stained with his disciple’s as well.
No matter what, he would not allow it.
“KRAAAAAAAAH!!!!!”
Sword Ghost poured every scrap of his energy—his very life force, his core essence—into one final strike, loading it into his beloved short sword.
Crack!
The blade, forced to hold too much power, began to fracture.
Hold on! Please! This is the first and last thing I’ll ever ask of you! That thing has to be destroyed!
Even if this life ended here, it didn’t matter—
please—
the sword held.
And it completed its final duty.
KRAAAAAAANG!!
The force was enough to shake the entire mountain like an earthquake.
Of course the sword could not survive it; not a fragment remained. But to the very end, the blade had done its job.
“Ghk!”
His hair had already been white, but the vitality of a superhuman’s body had still set it apart from an ordinary old man’s. Now it looked no different from the hair of a man about to draw his last breath. Proof of how completely he had poured himself into that single strike.
“Hah… hah! Ghk!”
Sword Ghost clutched his heart and coughed up blood. Even if the strike had failed to destroy the Demon Sword and it tried to take him as a host, a body this thoroughly wrecked by the expenditure of his core essence would be nearly useless to it. That was why he had spent his life force without holding anything back. He had no regrets. He had ruined his flesh so thoroughly that even if the Demon Sword possessed him… his disciple might still—
That was when it happened.
“O-Old man.”
“…?!”
Tragedy struck.
The Demon Sword had not been destroyed. It had taken damage—so much that, in the final instant, it had sacrificed nearly all of itself just to leave a fragment behind. And that fragment, for the sake of its own survival, had done something it never normally would: it changed its target from “an outstanding swordsman fit to be a host” to “someone easy to take over.”
Sword Ghost had never imagined a Demon Sword could possess a survival instinct, or choose a new target of its own will. It was a tragedy he could not have foreseen.
In the end, the fragment of the Demon Sword latched onto the easiest available host: Sword Ghost’s disciple.
Is this the price of my sins…
All he had wanted was to see the end of the sword’s path. For that single desire he had spilled so much blood… Was this the punishment the world had prepared for him?
His hands shook.
His disciple was coming closer.
“O-Old man! Help me! I d-don’t want this!”
The disciple cried out at a body moving against their will. The flesh under the Demon Sword’s control ignored the command. It simply walked toward the dying Sword Ghost with the dagger-shaped Demon Sword in hand. Neither of them could fail to understand what that meant.
“Old man! Kill me! Hurry!”
To the disciple, Sword Ghost had been the first real adult they had ever met. Taciturn, not particularly kind—but someone who always looked at them, who told them when they were wrong. A proper adult. A guardian. That was why they hated this. They didn’t want to see his blood. They would rather die themselves.
But that desperate wish—
Sword Ghost could not grant it.
“…You fool. What kind of grandfather in this world could kill his own kid?”
“…?!”
Sword Ghost could not kill his disciple.
He had never known how to show it properly, and so he had never said it out loud—but to him, the child was already his own blood. There was no such thing as an adult who could kill their own blood. There must never be.
And so Sword Ghost could do nothing at all toward his disciple.
“Close your eyes.”
“No! I said no! Kill me!”
“This isn’t your sin. It’s all punishment for a sinner like me.”
“Grandpa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“I’m sorry…”
Sword Ghost closed his eyes and smiled. It was the only thing he could offer, born of a desperate hope that it might ease the child’s wound even a little.
Which is why, if his eyes had been open, he would certainly have seen it.
Even a dying body still carried a superhuman’s eyes, after all.
Tiiiiiing!
“Looks like I’m not too late.”
The appearance of a third party.
No—
the appearance of the Hero.
An entrance that fit the rule of Heroes with almost cruel perfection: arriving at the absolute worst possible moment.