The Unfrozen Port (3)
"H-how does His Grace the Duke…"
The fishermen were in shock. Groll in particular had gone so black in the face that he looked barely alive.
Thud.
One by one, the fishermen began dropping to their knees. Soon every last one of them, Groll included, was kneeling before me.
"This ignorant fool never learned his letters and didn't recognize Your Excellency's noble face."
Groll pressed his forehead to the ground as he spoke.
"I'll accept whatever punishment you see fit to give me. Only spare my wife and children, I beg you."
"…Spare your wife and children."
I snorted.
"You seem awfully eager to turn me into a tyrant."
"…Pardon?"
Groll looked up.
"If I went around punishing people simply for failing to recognize my face, the dungeons wouldn't have a single empty cell left."
"You're… not going to punish me?"
Groll sounded like he couldn't believe it for the life of him.
"After all the things I said, you're truly going to forgive me? Then you really are the Duke, the one who— urk!"
A fellow fisherman drove his elbow hard into Groll's ribs. The meaning was clear enough: shut your mouth if you want to live.
"The reason I've come here isn't to squeeze money out of you. It's to rebuild Miren Port. Help me build the harbor, and I'll hire you as laborers and set aside land for your village beside the new port. In exchange, from now on you'll owe me taxes, every last coin of them."
"You're going to rebuild the port?"
"What, does that displease you?"
"Ah, I don't know whether it's my place to say this, but… our village is a port in name only. As you can see, the sea is frozen solid — no ship could ever put in here."
"The sea will melt."
"How could you…"
"I am the Duke of Esterzy, Groll."
I looked him dead in the eye.
"Do you imagine there's anything impossible for me?"
Groll's eyes went wide as saucers.
"So go ahead and say your goodbyes to that frozen sea."
I laughed cheerfully.
What would a territory ruled by an immortal at the Ascension Realm look like?
I could define it in a single sentence: under his reign, nothing would be impossible.
The giants conjured by the Art of Manifesting a Hundred from Nothing numbered two hundred in total.
I commanded them into roadwork. Grading and leveling a road demanded a human delicacy, so I assigned the giants to the rough labor instead — ripping out boulders and hauling away whole stretches of forest.
While the giants cleared the trees, I made a careful circuit of the coastline. I was scouting out spots to bury the ignition stones.
Shhhhaaaaah.
Watching the tide recede stirred a strange feeling in me. Memory, they say, is sometimes stored in scents, sometimes in sounds.
I had tucked a lifetime's memories into the smell and sound of waves.
I was born in a small fishing village. My father, my brothers… the people themselves had faded from my memory, but the sound of waves slipping through my window at night, the salt that clung to my blankets — those I could never forget.
"What are you thinking about?"
Uld asked.
"I didn't mean to interrupt, but you looked… sad."
"Me?"
I laughed at the absurdity of it.
"Not a chance."
Must have seen wrong, plain and simple. Why would I ever miss that miserable past life? A place where not a single person would have mourned me.
"Your Grace!"
Someone came looking for me. A child — a little tyke of six or seven, at most, scrambling energetically across the rocky shore.
"Hello, Your Grace!"
The boy bobbed his head in a bright greeting, then looked up at Uld.
"Who's the pretty lady?"
"My fiancée."
"Hi. I'm Uld."
Uld patted the child's head — and while she was at it, plucked a strip of seaweed from his hair.
"Hehe."
The boy grinned bashfully. His face was smeared with dirt, a trail of snot hung from his nose, and his clothes — stitched together from scraps of hide — were hardly better than rags.
A proper noblewoman would have recoiled with a shudder. Uld didn't hesitate for an instant to touch him.
"My dad says you're way more impressive than the guy who used to be the Duke, Your Grace! He says you've got real character and everything!"
"Who's your father?"
"The Harpoon King! Everyone calls Dad that!"
Ah, Groll — the man the fishermen called their leader. All stiff and proper in front of me, but talking about me behind my back like that.
"Just so you know, my nickname's the 'Harpoon King.' I've even got an Awoken Ability."
That man was no ordinary fisherman. And the anchor tattoo on his forearm had been bothering me.
According to Opils, Miren had never once been a port — not a single time in its history. If that was true, no sailor could possibly exist here. So why did Groll have an anchor inked into his arm?
And I was curious why a man skilled enough to beat a baron's knights was wasting away buried in this backwater village.
"Do you happen to know where your father's from?"
"My dad's hometown?"
"Where he was born."
"Um… yeah. Dad wasn't born in our village. He says it was somewhere way far to the west. But he said we're never supposed to tell anyone—"
The kid bit the bait, hook and all.
"Your Grace."
A thick voice rang out. Groll.
"Dad!"
The boy tore across the sand and flung himself into Groll's arms.
"My son knows nothing. If Your Grace has questions, ask me directly."
There were thorns in Groll's voice.
"Nothing happened, Groll. But I'll keep the advice in mind."
I said it awkwardly. Somehow I felt like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
"The village has reached a decision. Unanimously — we've agreed to support Your Grace's enterprise."
"Unanimous, is it? Surprising, given how much you all seemed to hate the idea of taxes."
My terms had been simple: either stay here and help build the port, or take a resettlement stipend and move to another village.
I'd figured half of them would refuse. The stipend I'd offered had been genuinely generous.
"If a three-tenths tax buys the protection of House Esterzy, there's no reason not to pay it. What we hate is the nobles who bleed us dry without ever lifting a finger to protect us."
"Then we have an accord."
"A lot of us can swim. We'll be useful for the dredging. There'll be monsters swarming the work site, no doubt about it, but the men here have hunted sea monsters all their lives. And since we've always had to make everything ourselves, we've got decent carpenters too. Anything else that takes muscle, we'll handle."
"Sailors?"
Groll's eyebrows twitched.
"Building a port isn't the same as starting a shipping trade. You need men to build the ships and men to crew them. Are there sailors in the village?"
"None."
Groll's eyes went hard as he repeated it.
"Not a single sailor."
Opils left for the ducal residence with the cost estimates in hand. Now that the figures were in, he planned to return with engineers, laborers, materials, and a full cargo of ignition stones.
Before he left, I gave him one secret errand.
"Look into a man named Groll. The name's likely a false one, so describe his face and clothing to Gray, at the trading company, in detail."
"Understood."
The burial sites for the ignition stones were already marked. Until Opils returned, there was nothing pressing to do — so I decided to enjoy a little rest.
A little rest, meaning…
"Stance is broken."
Uld pointed her blade at my leg.
"You mustn't move."
"I didn't move."
"Your breathing wavered. You have to hold your breath control all the way through."
I was learning the fourth form of Crimson Blade — Soul Pierce — from Uld. She'd looked so magnificent whenever she used that technique.
Truth be told, I was starting to regret it a little. When Uld taught swordsmanship she was like a completely different person, and martial arts, it turned out, belonged to a domain entirely separate from Daoist arts. Even at the Ascension Realm, this much was beyond my ability to cover with power alone.
"Pretty lady's winning!"
"No way, dummy. My dad says the Duke's stronger."
"Huh-uh! The lady's been winning this whole time!"
Our lessons had become the neighborhood children's favorite spectator sport. The main topic of debate, apparently, was who was stronger — Uld or me.
I'd like to know the answer myself, kids. I thought climbing to the Ascension Realm would let me gauge her true strength, but I still can't get a read on her.
Should I just challenge her to a proper marital bout?
We were deep into practice when a commotion suddenly broke out near the village entrance. I could see the laborers dropping their tools and running toward it.
One of the workers sprinted straight toward us. He reached us and shouted in a voice that could barely catch its breath.
"He's here! Baron Tores!"
Ah — the thieving wretch who'd tried to swindle my direct holdings.
"Come on, Uld."
I headed for the disturbance with Uld at my side. Fishermen and knights stood facing each other down — the fishermen gripping their harpoons, the knights with swords already drawn.
It was questionable whether those things deserved to be called knights at all. They wore armor, sure, but the material was cold steel. These days you couldn't swing a cat among mercenaries without hitting a man in cold-iron plate.
Then again, a baron ruling a backwater like this wouldn't have a real knightly order. Buy a suit of armor for some aging mercenary who's ready to settle down and there you have it — instant knight.
"What in blazes is this circus supposed to be?"
A weedy-looking young man demanded. Judging by the way everyone deferred to him, he was Baron Tores.
"I distinctly remember giving you until today to have my goods ready."
He spat on the ground, then rounded on Groll in a shrill, irritable tone.
"And what is that supposed to be? Why is perfectly good land being torn to pieces? What in the hell — who gave anyone leave to touch my land without permission?!"
He apparently hadn't seen the giants conjured by my Daoist arts. Which made sense — the giant legion was already a dozen kilometers away, ripping up the ground toward the city district.
"There's nothing here for you to take."
Groll answered in a gravelly rasp.
"And this isn't your land. It belongs to His Grace the Duke."
Tores's mouth twisted.
"What does a peasant brat think he knows, lecturing me? You think I don't know this is ducal land?"
Did you, though?
"I am a hero of the Battle of Andrassy, I'll have you know. Duke Iden Esterzy himself granted me my sword and my fief!"
Tores drew his blade. A pale light shimmered along the white steel.
"Look well, you beggar trash. This is what an Oradium sword looks like."
"It's alloyed."
Uld, who'd been listening, murmured quietly. I nodded in agreement.
Tores's blade glowed distinctly dimmer than the ones my knights carried. Without a doubt it was base metal laced with just a hint of Oradium.
Even after his grand display of a treasured blade, the fishermen were thoroughly unimpressed. They'd already seen my knights in full Oradium plate.
"And what are these little bastards glaring at, huh? You actually think you can defy your lord?"
"Think what you like. Either way, we won't give you so much as a copper."
"Oi, teach these brats some manners."
Tores jerked his chin at his knights. Five armed men stepped forward. The fishermen flinched — but not one of them retreated a single step. True to form for men who'd made their living hunting sea monsters.
That was my cue to step forward.
"And who are you supposed to be?"
Tores seemed thrown. I looked nothing like a fisherman to anyone's eyes.
"…Don't tell me you're a noble too?"
I didn't answer. I simply walked toward him, unhurried, step by step.
"Stop him, damn you! Stop him!"
As Tores shrieked, one of the knights lunged, sword flashing.
"Gwaaagh!"
The knight went flying before he'd even finished his swing, still frozen in the follow-through of the motion he'd never completed. The whole scene froze over in an instant. Even Tores himself hadn't seemed to see my sword move.
"Your stance is broken."
"Did it waver?"
"A little."
"…Damn it all."
I clicked my tongue. With Uld, there was never any mercy.
"S-s-stay back, you bastard!"
Tores swung his treasured blade with clumsy desperation. I caught the edge with my bare hand. There wasn't even a thread of sword qi on it — a toothpick like this couldn't have scratched me if it tried.
"Eeeek!"
Tores's face swelled crimson, fit to burst. He was squeezing out every ounce of strength he'd ever had trying to wrench his sword free.
Screeeeech———!
Smoke began rising from my palm. At the same time, the flat of the treasured blade started to melt, dripping down in molten rivulets.
"Wh-what are you?!"
"…Well. There may be another tyrant rumor about me after this."
Tores stared at me with terror in his eyes — a fear that was steadily curdling into outright horror. He was so stunned that he eventually started hiccupping. He was a different creature from the fishermen; at least he seemed to know something about my appearance. I glared into his eyes and smiled coldly.
"Thing is, I don't recall ever awarding you anything."
— The Northern Grand Duke's Daoist Arts Are No Joke, Chapter 106 —