Has Master's Friend Been Protecting?
Tumble-tumble-tumble-tumble~~~~
It was the first time Dragon Egg Rhea had ever seen snow. The moment it piled up across the front yard, she threw herself into a frenzy of rolling around on top of it, too busy playing to notice anything else.
"Snow, huh. I hate it."
Unlike Dragon Egg Rhea, who adored the stuff so completely, I never cared for snow. Looking at it always dragged up unpleasant memories.
"Though maybe they weren't all bad memories?"
I'd never once believed the adults' claim that any memory becomes a good one with enough time... but this case might have to be the exception.
It had been an insanely hard stretch of my life, yet it wasn't as if there hadn't been good moments mixed in among the rest.
"So time really is the great healer, is it?"
The north is cold. Too cold. Extremely cold. It is, in every sense, an environment utterly unsuited for human life. So much so that even being born into the ducal house that rules the north is nothing anyone envies. The northern duchy can never accumulate real wealth, and its duty is to spend an entire lifetime governing and defending that madly harsh stretch of land.
That is how insane the north is.
And in that place, as if monsters alone weren't enough, the barbarians came pouring in as well.
The northern barbarians.
Hunting in the north is difficult. Wild animals aren't entirely absent, but every last one of them either hides well or flees well, making the whole business exhausting. So the northern barbarians began chasing something easier to hunt than those wild animals.
As a result, the Empire had to send large numbers of imperial knights and soldiers north, and at the same time it was only natural that mercenaries would flock there for the bounty placed on the northern barbarians.
I was among them back then—still a B-class mercenary.
Money wasn't really the point. Word had it that the northern barbarians had gained a chieftain, and the damage they inflicted had spiked because of it. Yet almost no one treated that news with any real urgency. Even if a chieftain made them move a little more cleverly, they were still just barbarians; nothing would change all that much. Everyone made that same complacent judgment.
And then Balik, of all people, started talking about heading north to make some coin... I couldn't just stand by and watch, so I went with him. At the time my name already carried weight among mercenaries, and as a B-class I had enough standing that other mercenaries listened when I spoke. Nobles and knights might even give a B-class a hearing. If my presence could cut the damage even a little, I couldn't sit still.
In the end, I nearly died.
I thought I was being careful, but the truth was I had let my guard down too.
I never imagined the northern barbarians would prepare a trap that used a cliff like that. Fortunately I sensed it just before the trap sprang, and I moved fast, trying to keep even one more person from falling in. While I was trying to help a knight whose bulk kept him from getting clear in time, the trap activated completely... and I went over the cliff with him.
That knight's name was Galahad Patton, an imperial knight.
"It is finished."
"...You have worked hard."
The 1st Prince looked at Galahad Patton, who was offering a knight's formal salute before him, with an expression that was hard to put into words.
The man whose loyalty was said to be like steel itself—so much so that he was called the Knight of Steel—had been regarded as the pro-emperor knight whose mind would be hardest to change. The 1st Prince had never imagined that Galahad would of his own will abandon the pro-emperor faction, come under a new banner, and swear loyalty.
Thanks to that, the situation inside the imperial knights—which the prince had expected to be the most difficult—shifted with startling speed. Once Galahad, the very face of the pro-emperor faction, changed sides, there was no way that faction could hold together within the order.
In the end the 1st Prince was able to reverse the entire flow of power far faster than he had planned. He knew full well how much of that he owed to Galahad. And yet he still could not understand it. A man who had been so thoroughly loyal he was called the "Emperor's faithful hound," a man the prince had watched as the final wall that would protect the emperor—why had he discarded that loyalty so quickly?
Until now the only being the 1st Prince could not comprehend, and therefore feared most in this world, had been Hero Sera. So he could not help asking the man himself.
"That you were the first to stand beneath the new banner I raised is truly a joy to me... but will you not tell me the reason now?"
"Many people misunderstand. I never followed orders so faithfully because my loyalty was especially strong. I simply valued the role of a knight, and therefore performed that role as a knight should."
A knight performing a knight's duty. The driving force for that is loyalty; therefore doesn't that mean he possesses loyalty after all? That was how the 1st Prince thought. But since the man himself denied it, it clearly was not so.
"I died once."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I received my knighthood in the north and fought the northern barbarians as an imperial knight. Have you ever heard of the chieftain of the northern barbarians?"
"I have. Because a chieftain appeared, the northern barbarians began to move like an army, and the damage kept rising until that chieftain was killed. That is what I was told."
There had been many signs that the northern barbarians had changed, yet no one imagined they would change that far. That became the spark that led to catastrophic losses.
"I was fighting in that period as well. Then I fell into a trap the chieftain had prepared and went over a cliff—together with a strange mercenary."
"A strange mercenary?"
"Your Highness has never truly experienced mercenaries, I expect. Every last one of them is a man whose eyes light up at profit. Honor, conviction, justice—none of those things exist for them. And that is only natural. They drew their swords for gain, so placing profit above all else is simply their choice; there is nothing odd about it. Which means that particular mercenary was the strange one."
Having said that much, Galahad wet his throat with the wine the 1st Prince had offered him, then continued.
"It was a hair-trigger situation. In that moment, putting his own safety first would have been completely understandable. Yet that man, even though he grasped the danger first, put others ahead of himself. In the brief time he had, he worked to save even one more person, and in the end he reached out to save me as well—and was swept away with me. I could not help thinking he was a man who did not fit the word 'mercenary' at all. After that we fell together over the cliff... and what waited for us was a darkness like hell."
"And you survived inside it?"
"'Was kept alive' would be the correct way to put it."
"Kept alive?"
"I was never particularly skilled at handling aura. Falling off a cliff should have left me anything but unharmed. The reason I lived was that strange mercenary who fell with me. Unlike me, he was highly skilled with aura; he could easily have used it to keep himself safe. Instead he used it to protect me. As a result I came through unhurt, while that strange mercenary was left little better than a corpse. Even in that state, he did not die—though dying right then would have been no surprise."
Galahad Patton had never once forgotten that moment.
In the northern wind so cold it felt ready to freeze and tear the flesh, he had asked the strange mercenary who was all but a corpse why he had saved him.
The strange mercenary had answered like this:
"'I saved you because I thought I could.' That is what the strange mercenary said."
"...An extraordinary man."
The 1st Prince had never seen that strange mercenary, yet he could not help being impressed. As a fellow man, he had no choice but to acknowledge him. Truly an extraordinary man.
"And then he said this: 'Once I retire, I dream of a quiet life of seclusion. Until I achieve that dream, there is no way I will die.' And he kept that word. He held on until the rescue party arrived, received treatment, recovered safely, left a single letter, and vanished."
"What did the letter say?"
"'Do not think you owe me your life. It is only natural for a friend to save a friend, and between friends there can be no room for something like a debt to exist.' That is what it said."
"So his hobby was reading, was it? A mercenary whose hobby is reading... he really was a strange mercenary."
It was a passage from a famous work of classical literature—the contents of a letter left by a knight who willingly spurred his beloved horse toward certain death for a friend. The strange mercenary had written those exact words in the letter he left for Galahad Patton.
"So after becoming an imperial knight, you went looking for him?"
"By the time I became an imperial knight and searched for him, he had already retired and gone into seclusion."
"You did not go to him?"
"He had gone into seclusion, so of course I could not. I simply made an effort."
"What kind of effort?"
"An effort to protect that friend's seclusion."
"What did you do?"
"Knights and mercenaries have something in common. Do you know what it is?"
For the 1st Prince it was a bewildering question. Knights and mercenaries... He had been taught that honorable knights and dishonorable mercenaries could never be spoken of in the same breath, and he had taken that as natural. He had never imagined he would be asked such a thing—least of all from a knight's own mouth.
"I do not know."
In the end he could only say he did not know. As if he had expected that answer, Galahad nodded and spoke.
"In the end, it is work that makes blood flow. No matter how grand the words you use, a knight swings his sword for loyalty and makes blood flow; a mercenary swings his sword for profit and makes blood flow. And once you have made blood flow, it is only natural that blood returns to you. So even if he retired and went into seclusion, it was only natural that the blood he had spilled would seek to return as blood."
"Surely you..."
"I merely followed His Majesty's commands. It simply 'happened' to overlap."
"......"
The Knight of Steel was still the Knight of Steel.
It was simply that the one he had sworn to protect with his life had never been the emperor.
When the emperor gave an order, Galahad used it appropriately and swung his sword to protect the one he truly meant to protect. In other words, he only pretended to swing his sword according to the emperor's command; the sword he truly swung had been for that strange mercenary alone.
The emperor looks only at results. He does not care much about the process. If it appeared that a powerhouse like Galahad Patton had done his utmost to carry out the order through the emperor's own authority, that was enough to satisfy him.
He never saw the truth of who had truly been used.
"...I see. You never once changed the object of your loyalty."
"I merely protected my own soul."
The 1st Prince shook his head as if conceding defeat.
"May I ask the name of that strange mercenary?"
"He is called Steel Jade. He is the master of Hero Candidate Sera."
To hear Sera's name here of all places... No—the proper reaction was surely to be astonished by Jade, the Hero's master, the man who had exerted such enormous influence over both Sera and Galahad.
"I see. So he shares a name with you?"
"An amusing coincidence, but for me it is a happy one."
Was it truly a coincidence?
The thought crossed the 1st Prince's mind for a moment, but he shook his head, deciding that even so it was impossible.
Like master, like disciple, is it... In the end the emperor who seemed utterly unshakable was sent tumbling over a cliff by those two.
I will not make that same mistake, the 1st Prince vowed to himself again and again.