The Sea Horned Dragon's Price
"...What do you mean, exactly?"
If the emissaries had somehow been weeping their way toward a demand for tax relief, the Giant Slayer might well have been renamed the Merchant Slayer. Fortunately for everyone involved, the envoys from the city were not so bold as that. They knew perfectly well that the new conqueror could demand a life-or-death duel on a whim, and none of them had the slightest intention of spurning his generosity. However rich and self-assured their city might be, they were not about to provoke a man whose prestige soared into the heavens. They had come, quite simply, out of desperation.
"You came to me because you couldn't kill a monster?"
Johan asked again, as if he couldn't believe his ears. What they were saying simply didn't add up. In a world with far more wilderness than settled land, monsters were a serious and constant threat. It wasn't for nothing that wandering knights made their living hunting them for bounties. But for the city of Gilsina to send emissaries over a single beast it couldn't kill was absurd. The city kept a decent retinue of mercenaries, after all, and it could always have begged the nearby knights for help.
"...?"
Fahid, Ahir's eldest son, who had been listening nearby, found Johan's reaction puzzling. He spoke up carefully.
"My lord Count... is it truly so hard to believe that they cannot slay a monster and have come begging aid from a hero such as yourself? It hardly seems a strange thing to ask."
Hm?
Only then did Johan realize he had misread the situation. True, weak monsters could be handled by citizen militias or hired blades. But the moment something on the order of a minotaur or a cyclops appeared, the whole region went on emergency footing. Only a handful of knights ever volunteered to take on such creatures, and the odds of success were never good. Not everyone could batter a monster to death with barefaced stupidity the way Johan did. Asking a knight with an established record of monster hunting — a knight like him — was hardly unusual at all.
"I see. Explain it to me in detail."
Gilsina sat at the crossroads between the Peninsula and the White Kingdom — a nexus of trade blessed with a natural harbor. Southern Ishan worshippers and northern Monist faithful came and went in turn, while western White Kingdomers and eastern Peninsula folk mingled in their thousands. The city's lifeblood, naturally, was its port.
And that port was now sealed shut by a single monster.
Its name was the Horned Sea Dragon Noptius. A lesser drake of the sea, so vast and hulking that legend claimed dragon's blood ran in its ancestry — armored in hide both hard and supple, and possessed of a wicked, cunning intelligence.
So something like a giant lizard — a dinosaur that can breathe underwater?
Studying the envoys' frantic description and the illustrations they'd brought, Johan sketched a rough image of the beast in his mind. A colossal lizard that thrashed between sea and land, laying waste to both.
When they had finished, Johan said nothing. The envoys, being seasoned courtiers of a merchant city, read his silence instantly and hurried to speak.
"We have brought gifts to celebrate your rightful enthronement, my lord. Please, behold the finest ship in our city, and the treasure with which her hold is filled to the brim."
"When exactly was this enthronement of mine? A touch late, isn't it?"
"A mortal offense, my lord! The monster churned the very seas, and our sailors were too terrified to make ready and set sail!"
There were overland routes as well, and the beast's rampage didn't seem to have lasted all that long. Besides, Johan rather doubted they'd have groveled quite so enthusiastically even without the monster. But rather than press the point, he decided to play along.
"Ah, of course. The monster's fault, then."
"Please, accept this document we offer in the name of our Council."
Instead of passing it to a scribe to read aloud, Johan took the parchment himself and read it. The envoy's eyes went wide. He had never imagined that this new Count might read unaided, without a clerk's assistance.
Stripped of its long, winding rhetorical flourishes, Gilsina's message was simple. Slay this one monster, and they would surrender everything — everything except their autonomy.
They hand over their autonomy, and the moment I leave, the councilors start hanging by their necks.
A city's self-governance was its life and its soul. Even if the city starved for it, surrendering that would mean at least a few noble houses burned and hanged in the streets. Johan had no intention of collecting on that particular debt. As long as the gold flowed properly and they bowed correctly, he had no desire to forcibly disrupt a city that ran itself quite well. It wasn't as though Johan were some madman drunk on ambition.
"Very well. I will consider it."
"We shall await your answer, my lord!"
The emissaries bowed with grave courtesy and withdrew. In their retreating backs, their desperation showed plainly. They were yielding the floor for now, but the will radiating off them was unmistakable: until they heard his answer, they would never set foot off this territory.
"Lower your right hand, not the left."
"Ah. Right. Is the rest acceptable?"
"Yes. It is flawless, my lord."
Fahid nodded over Johan's etiquette, genuinely impressed. For a conqueror from across the sea to devote such care to the manners and customs of this land was a rare virtue indeed.
Seeing this, it felt like a lie that this same man had whirled a warhammer around the battlefield like a lunatic, tearing his enemies apart limb from limb. Watching Johan's formal Eastern speech and courtly bearing, no one would have blinked if he'd claimed to be born of a White Kingdom noble house.
"But are you certain we need not fly your banner, my lord?"
"I told you not to worry about it."
Johan had worked through the proposal a few times, tugging it back and forth, and finally accepted the envoys' offer. He'd be trading one monster's death for rights and revenues worth several years of income. There was no reason to be modest about it.
And even if I fail and have to slink away, I'll still have their gratitude and their submission at the minimum.
Decision made, Johan set out for Gilsina with thousands of mercenaries in his wake...
...or rather, he didn't. Hauling several thousand sellswords along to kill one monster was pointless extravagance, and they wouldn't have been much use anyway.
Instead Johan gathered the elite of his elite. He would travel with only a few dozen cavalry and knights — more than ample force for the journey.
So far, so unremarkable. But then Johan marched not under the sacred banner of House Eitz, but under the banners of several lesser houses — minor noble families so obscure that anyone without a command of White Kingdom heraldry couldn't have placed them at all.
"Won't flying the banners of their houses draw too much attention?"
"You think so...?"
A noble flew his banner even when crossing hostile territory — it was simply how things were done. Fahid couldn't make sense of it. Lords did sometimes slip into taverns incognito to pick up rumors about their lands, but that was ever a temporary thing. Concealing one's house banner for an entire long journey was, for an honorable knight, a genuinely painful undertaking.
"I bet it was Firwal spouting off his nonsense again."
"Surely not..."
The second son cursed the third. The third was hot-blooded and reckless by nature — wasn't it the third who'd been howling, when they first met Johan, that he could have won if they'd fought him in a proper duel?
Though by Fahid's reckoning, the second son was hardly better. Wasn't it the second who'd stood before the cyclops, screaming profanities at Johan and ordering him to fall back?
Of course, he'd done it in the Eastern tongue, so he'd assumed Johan couldn't understand. But as far as Fahid could tell, Johan had already possessed a working grasp of the language even back then. He would have caught the gist.
"Galambos. How does one hunt a horned sea dragon?"
"...M-my lord. The Eastern Rangers roam the forests, the mountains, and the rivers. The sea... is not our business."
Sweat beaded down Galambos's back.
After a lifetime of nobles who treated hunters like dirt, finding a liege who truly valued his skills had been, frankly, a stroke of fortune — all the more so considering how they'd first met. But having that liege rate him too highly was its own kind of terror. The mercenaries around him snickered.
"The man's clearly full. Give the village back to the town, my lord."
"For that kind of payment he ought to squeeze out a method even where none exists..."
The mercenaries who had followed Johan from the very beginning and earned their merit each held a small village or so. For mercenaries, it was an almost unheard-of rise.
Yet most of them, rather than settling down on their land, had chosen to keep trailing after Johan. Perhaps it was wanderlust. Perhaps loyalty. Only the mercenaries themselves knew the reason.
"Oi. Is that the young lord's family over there? I think we're supposed to dismount."
"We've got a lord too, don't we?"
"A madman should at least compare like with like... with his one village."
"One village? Where'd you get one? If I tell folks back home I own a village, nobody'll believe me."
"That's because we don't believe you, either."
While the mercenaries chattered, the scions of the house governing this territory rode past in the distance. Johan and his knights offered a light greeting. The young nobles returned it with considerable arrogance.
"...those heathen bastards are itching to die, I swear to the gods..."
"Hey. Let it go."
Wandering knights passing through a lord's domain were still nobility — but only just, and weakly so.
Had the banners been those of a famous house, the local lords would have ridden out to pay their respects and extend invitations. But with banners belonging to obscure houses, there was no obligation to seek anyone out first. If anything, it should have been them coming over, bowing, and humbly begging for an audience — and even that would have been too little.
"You did well, young masters."
"If they come before us and fail to dismount, then go fetch them."
"Yes, as you say."
The servants nodded. Then, one after another, mercenaries began emerging from the forest behind them. What had looked like five or six riders swelled into several dozen, and the servants' faces drained to a ghostly white.
These were no mere wandering knights. They were men who led mercenaries.
"S-shall we... go fetch them, then?"
"Are you insane?! Stand still!"
"Seems I scared them for nothing."
"When a large body of armed men passes through, some alarm is only natural, my lord."
Fahid nodded as he said it. A wandering knight was one thing; a knight at the head of a mercenary company was an object of fear. Those were the men who turned into brigands the moment circumstances turned against them.
"Perhaps I chose banners from houses too humble?"
Johan's real reason for not flying the Eitz banner was to take the pulse of the White Kingdom firsthand as he rode. The reports all sang the same tune — everyone swears fealty, my lord, and so does the house next door — but Johan knew better than anyone how such reports always arrived with a coat of butter on them. He'd flown lowborn banners to avoid needless scrutiny, and instead had managed to earn suspicion of an entirely different kind.
"You could simply ride over and speak with them, my lord. That would likely put their minds at ease."
Merely stating which house they came from, and from which province, and what their purpose was, would have washed away the fear of banditry. Johan shook his head.
"No need. They're already frightened — I've no desire to make it worse by introducing myself. Next territory, we'll send word ahead and ask permission properly."
"Yes. A sound approach."
Johan raised his hand. At the signal, the mercenaries fell in and began cantering down the road toward the edge of the territory. Only then could the servants breathe again.
"They... they weren't bandits after all."
"Looking at them, some were Peninsula folk, weren't they? Probably men serving under the new Count, no?"
"!"
At one servant's remark, the young noble put on an expression of belated realization.
"And you're telling me this now?!"
"M-my apologies."
Their clean withdrawal — no trouble, no fuss, simply gone — spoke of rigorous training, and their full kit marked them unmistakably as elites. Almost certainly mercenaries under the Count's command. The newly arrived conqueror's reputation was on every noble house's lips in the region. Save for a few rebellious families, the rest were all straining to adapt, whether they liked it or not.
"Fetch them back! We must show the magnanimity of our house!"
"Y-yes, milord!"
"So you were warriors serving under Count Eitz after all."
The noble who had summoned them back was scarcely older than Johan — still with a boyish softness to him, the sort a household's servants would have called "the young master."
Watching him strain to project noble dignity and face made the knights want to laugh, but mercenaries were old hands at bowing their heads before their betters. So they played dumb. The food was good, after all...
Thrown together in haste as it was, this was a noble house's table, and the food was genuinely fine. And the White Kingdom was a land of rich provisions besides. The mercenaries drained their wine and offered up dutiful murmurs of agreement.
"Isn't Count Eitz a true hero! I've heard he is a knight among knights!"
"But he's a heathen, isn't he? And there are all those rumors going about. They say the man is cruel and greedy."
"......"
"......"
The knights and mercenaries clenched their jaws. Watching Johan praise the slander of himself with a perfectly straight face made their faces twitch with something close to agony.