The Troll Slayer of Marcel
I was being far too casual about this — and so was Lady Suëtll.
A tournament was no place to pace yourself and fight with an easy hand. It was a battlefield where anyone who caught your eye attacked on sight, without rhyme or reason.
To survive, you had to break whoever charged at you — and the moment you did, attention was inevitable.
"Yulska of House Gemarti!"
"Johan of Eitz. Come."
Yulska kicked her horse forward, long hair streaming behind her. Her eyes burned with fury, but her movements held not a tremor of it. She, too, was a seasoned knight.
"Watch out for him! He's the one who felled Sir Boriska."
"I know!"
Most knights, charging with lance couched, never struck straight on. They thrust at a diagonal, slanting their blows — because they feared the shock of impact and the collision that followed.
Johan, however, thrust straight down the middle.
Whether that was inexperience or genuine confidence in his raw strength, no one could say — but the result spoke for itself. Johan won, and Boriska went down.
Was he some famous knight, then?
Boriska of House Peteo was a knight of considerable renown in these parts, and the men who rode against Johan were his sworn retinue. None of that, of course, had reached Johan's ears.
The two knights split to either side and wheeled to strike him together. Each read the other's intent with blunt, unspoken clarity.
In this tournament, where blunted weapons were the rule, unhorsing your opponent demanded methods you would never use in a real fight.
Knock the man from his saddle. Strip his helm. Shatter his weapon outright...
The knights circling Johan appeared to have settled on the first two at once. Their blows came swinging down from above, vicious and heavy. Johan sank his weight into his stirrups, lifted himself in the saddle, and absorbed them with loose, supple grace.
In mounted combat, more than brilliant swordsmanship, what mattered was split-second judgment and mastery of the horse. Unable to finish him in a single pass, the two knights wheeled their mounts around for another charge.
That was when Johan counterattacked.
He swung without so much as a breath. Even two men attacking in concert could not coordinate their timing every single time. Johan drove a flurry of blows into the torso of the knight who closed first.
Once. Twice. Three times.
On the third strike, the man fell from his horse. Yulska stared in open horror — even blocked behind a shield, the man had been smashed clean off his saddle by that monstrous strength.
But the fight wasn't over. Johan hooked his shield onto one arm, seized Yulska's arm with his free hand, and hauled — dragging her bodily out of her saddle.
A second unhorsing.
A roar erupted from the stands.
To everyone watching, it looked as though Johan had felled two knights with a single motion.
"Johan of Eitz!"
"The Troll Slayer of Marcel!"
It was only natural that a knight's name spread the instant he distinguished himself — and besides, the mercenaries who followed Johan were whooping and shouting themselves hoarse, gleefully explaining to anyone in earshot exactly what kind of man their employer was.
"My lord Duke! Magnificent! To gauge the abilities of a knight you have never seen at a single glance — I could never even dream of it."
"If you wish to know what a knight is worth, look upon the hot soul he carries. No adornment, however fine, can hide a soul."
At Duke Brudhe's words, his children wore expressions of wonder. The Duke, for his part, was reeling inwardly.
How could I have forgotten what manner of man Count Zarfen is...
Unlike the other nobles, Count Zarfen was not the sort to hand out recommendations on the strength of blood ties and patronage networks.
The knight must truly have earned it — that was the only reason he would have sent him all this way east.
The Duke smoothed his brow. He had made no overt blunder, yet he found himself quietly repenting his own judgment.
I still have far to go. O God, forgive me my arrogance.
"Sir Lukes is making a name for himself, my lord."
"Yes. I see him."
Once the first clash and the opening brawl had run their course, the true quality of the better knights began to show. A handful had already felled several opponents and were carving their way through the enemy line.
The knights of the west held the clearer advantage.
The eastern knights, when it came down to it, were mostly warriors from beyond the Empire's borders — men far removed from the Imperial school of knighthood.
They wore light armor rather than heavy plate, favored lean, long-winded horses over massive, muscled destriers, and lived by their own customs rather than by faith and honor.
In an Imperial tournament such as this, disadvantage was all but guaranteed.
And yet, even from the east, a few knights began to shine.
The Duke hoped they would distinguish themselves — or, if they lost, that they would lose with honor. With sharp eyes he tracked the shifting flow of the melee.
Should matters turn too far against the eastern knights, he had resolved to declare the contest over in the Duke's own name.
Oh. This might actually wrap up comfortably after all.
After he had felled three knights, no one came at Johan anymore. Part of it was that everyone was too preoccupied with the foes at their own throats — but part of it was that they had grown wary of him.
The enemy saw no reason to start with the man standing quietly off to the side.
The knights tangled and broke apart, clashed and disengaged, fighting scattered engagements over and over.
As a result, the field grew roomier by the moment, and Johan — waiting idly at a distance — found himself with time to spare.
I doubt the ones I dropped hold grudges. Friendship, though... hmm. That might be a stretch. They seemed a bit petty.
"It's their commander! Take him down!"
"Fell their commander and the field is ours!"
"!"
Johan looked up. Western knights who had broken through the line were charging at Aclada.
True to his centaur nature, Aclada was darting this way and that, deftly shaking off his pursuers — but the knights were no pushovers either. They harried him relentlessly, driving their horses hard at every turn.
The fighting had passed its midpoint, and if a commander fell or surrendered now, the Duke was likely to call an end to it all.
-Fight with honor!
-Careful, centaur knight!
-Ooooh! God is watching!
Remarkably, the crowd was cheering for Aclada. Even those who shunned centaurs had no choice, in a moment like this, but to grant him his honor.
More than five knights chasing a single man, desperately combining their attacks — in a war, perhaps, but that was no honorable way for knights to fight.
"Why not surrender and be done with it, centaur!"
"You humans ought to have died by my bow long ago — and now you've grown fat and bold! Well then? Why don't you come at me one on one?"
"......"
The knights flinched, struck squarely where it hurt. One on one, they knew, none of them could beat Aclada.
The unity of rider and mount that knights spent a lifetime striving to reach, centaurs achieved from the moment they drew breath.
"■■■■ ■!"
With a snarl of vicious Eastern, his cousin Euclia waded in from the flank, spear in hand. Just as it seemed the tide might turn, three more knights came galloping up to bar her way.
Aclada cried out in bitter disbelief.
"Have you no shame and no honor at all? The ones who called me a savage brute — and look at you now!"
"Silence that cursed wretch!"
"A centaur cur, daring to speak!"
Aclada's taunting had plainly set the knights' tempers alight. They came on savagely. This would not end quietly — blood was going to spill.
The Duke's face twisted. His hand already gripped his sword.
The moment that blade left its sheath, the fight would be over.
And then Johan stepped in.
Strange — his mind drifted to the elf knights. When he'd ridden with them they had been insufferable, but now that they were gone they seemed, for no particular reason, like decent sorts after all.
No — perhaps they really had been decent. If it had been them, they would have insisted on one-on-one combat even in that situation.
A knight ought to be honorable, but...
If every knight were honorable, why would the honorable ones be praised at all?
Honor was not a thing easily kept. Everyone said it must be kept — but only because so few could keep it that those few were called great.
The knights charging at him now were the same. Johan felt, truth be told, a flicker of kinship.
Ah, so the knights here are human too! All their fine talk, and when it comes to the crunch they act just like me!
And then his eyes met Aclada's.
Aclada said nothing, but he stared at Johan with fiercely proud eyes. The plea was unmistakable: help me.
If he waded in now and turned this into a brawl, he'd never part ways with these western knights on friendly terms...
Johan made up his mind. He would side with the centaur knights.
He had no idea which choice paid better. It might even cost him. But honestly...
he liked the centaurs more than he liked those knights.
"■■■■!"
"Kuhk!"
Johan charged, bellowing in Eastern that he would slaughter their four parents and every last child of theirs and bury them all in a single grave — and Aclada stumbled, nearly turning his own ankle. In all his born days, nothing like this had ever happened to him.
"What did he just say?"
"A knight from the Empire, speaking Eastern...?"
The knights sprawled nearby, unhorsed or dismounted, burst out laughing at the sudden eruption of Eastern — only the western knights were left flustered.
But the Eastern was only the beginning.
"If you're knights, then fight me one on one!"
"Da—"
Johan swung his sword straight at the helm of the luckless knight at the fore. Sparks flew, and the man rolled sideways out of his saddle.
Next was the shield of the knight riding beside him. He hammered it with everything he had — the enemy tumbled from his horse, and at last Johan's own sword shattered.
"Gra—"
Thinking he'd spotted an opening, the knight spurred forward in a rush of excitement — but Johan closed the distance first. Charged at by a man with no weapon in hand at all, the knight was thunderstruck.
What kind of gall—?!
Thwack!
Johan snatched the mace right out of the man's grip. Stunned at being disarmed, the knight stared at him — and Johan answered with the mace.
In the blink of an eye, three men lay rolling in the dirt. With a battle cry, Johan rode to reinforce Euclia.
"!"
The knight who had witnessed the whole spectacle showed astonishing judgment. He wheeled his horse around and fled.
Running from the field was the deepest disgrace a knight could suffer — and flee he did.
That was how terrifying Johan's momentum had become.
A storm of deafening jeers chased the fleeing knight, and Johan mercilessly hammered the torso of one who stayed.
Shield or no shield, not a single knight took Johan's full-force blows and kept his seat — far less from horseback.
"■■! ■■! ■■!"
"Talk like that and no one understands you! Speak slowly!"
Answering the overexcited centaur knight-maiden, Johan wheeled his horse around.
The knights ganging up on Aclada were so absorbed in their assault they had no idea what was unfolding behind them. Only when Johan — face twisted like some demon's — was bearing down on their backs did they turn at someone's frantic shout.
-Behind you! Look behind you!
"Urhk!"
One knight fell from his saddle without even being struck, absurdly enough. Terrified out of his wits, he let go of the reins and simply tumbled off sideways.
The crowd laughed so hard they stomped their feet, half out of their minds.
You have to be on the receiving end of that to understand...
Stefan thought to himself.
It was easy to laugh from the stands, but that charge had been genuinely dangerous — a man could have been killed falling like that. There was something in Johan's momentum that went beyond mere knighthood, something else entirely.
"It gladdens you, does it not, to see Sir Johan in such fine form!"
"Ah... of — of course it does!"
"Sir Johan has felled another!"
-The Troll Slayer of Marcel!
-The Troll Slayer of Marcel!
The fervor reached its peak.
Entangled with the knights, Johan absorbed blow after blow as he drove in close, letting the shocks roll off his back and shoulders, enduring them with pure muscle.
And he collected the price of every one. They traded blows, one for one — but the only man still in his saddle was Johan.
"Damn it all! Is Sir Johan even human?!"
"Front! Watch your front, you blasted fool!"
"Haha! Watching it, watching it!"
Aclada whooped and whirled his spear.
Johan had unhorsed every other knight — but he left one man alone: the one who seemed to lead them all. Lukes of House Lachio.
He could have taken the man down as well, yet he yielded the kill to Aclada — and at the sight of it, the crowd wept out, "Blessing upon his great honor!"
That noble conduct, so utterly unlike the coordinated ganging-up of the western knights, set the crowd boiling.
Johan called out in Eastern.
"Want help from behind?"
"No! I can manage!"
Aclada shouted back, sweat streaming. He himself was winded from riding flat-out all this time, but Sir Lukes was in no better state — Lukes's horse in particular was heaving and panting, utterly spent.
Aclada read the horse better than he read its rider. In pure weapon-craft, Lukes probably had the edge...
Thud!
Instead of crossing swords, Aclada slammed into Lukes's horse. The animal shrieked and went over sideways.
"Forgive me — you were an honorable friend!"
Apologizing to the horse in Eastern, Aclada hastily leveled his blade at Lukes's neck. Lukes, reaching for the weapon he had dropped, let his hand fall and wore an expression of pure resignation.
"...I yield."
The eastern knights, who still had strength left in their lungs, raised their weapons to the sky. It was a victory, clear and undisputed.