Chapter 61
The third time I met Fia, she was with Quentin.
Fia looked strangely composed, wearing a polite smile completely different from the one she'd shown at the banquet the other day.
...She must have been so ashamed of showing off that three-year-old's belly that she wanted to pretend it had never happened.
I recalled my resolve from the other day and renewed my vow to myself: as a knight, I would forget all about Fia's belly.
As for Quentin, who was with Fia, Cyril had worried that the strain of a long expedition had left him mentally unwell. He was absolutely right.
Quentin had never had any trouble with his appearance, yet he showed up at the royal council meeting soaking wet. There was no way that was normal.
When I asked in surprise what had happened, he answered with a perfectly serious face that Fia-sama had splashed him with water she'd had in her mouth.
If he got wet, why didn't he dry himself off?
Why was he using polite language with Fia, a rookie knight, and even addressing her as Fia-sama?
Suspicious, I watched from a distance as Quentin—whom Fia had berated for having the worst possible taste in word choice—desperately clung to her.
It was so creepy it sent shivers down my spine.
...Damn, it looked like Quentin had developed some seriously strange tastes.
Could a person really develop a weird fetish this suddenly?
Quentin had always been a solitary figure.
He preferred being alone and often was, but when necessary, he could keep his subordinates properly in line. He was an excellent knight commander.
He was a capable knight, too, quiet but always able to offer the right advice or warning when it was needed.
And yet, after I hadn't seen him for barely half a year, he'd ended up like this.
Like Cyril said, I could only hope the cause was exhaustion from the long expedition and that he'd recover with time.
I thought things had settled down when the Commander-in-Chief entered the royal council meeting, but now Cyril and Quentin were fighting over Fia.
...Is this some kind of contagious illness?
Cyril was the head of the kingdom's foremost ducal house and commander of its foremost knight order, so his ability to assess a situation was exceptional.
No matter the circumstances, he was supposed to put his own emotions second, skillfully manage other people's feelings, and steer things to his advantage... or at least, he used to.
Cyril, what happened to you, too?
I meant to settle the confusion, so I told Fia, "Come to my side." Cyril and Quentin whipped around and glared at me with incredible speed.
Damn, they're both in bad shape.
But maybe Fia was the worst of all.
When she had to choose one of us three—Cyril, Quentin, or me—she somehow picked Clarissa, the Fifth Knight Order's commander, whom she'd only just met.
Why? I can't make heads or tails of Fia's thought process.
...While I agonized over how utterly incomprehensible Fia was, she happily followed behind Clarissa.
What a carefree person. People like her are always the only ones happy, no matter the situation.
And everyone around them has to suffer for it.
I felt a little sorry for Cyril.
After that, I even saw Gidion, Quentin's adjutant, who always struck me as a bit too cocky, fall under Fia's spell.
Gidion, who always seemed to look down on everyone, was kneeling at Fia's feet, even though she was only about half his height, begging her for something.
Whoa, this is seriously starting to creep me out.
Was that really Gidion? Could it be someone else?
But when I spoke to him, he responded as usual, leaving no room to doubt it was really him.
I found it unsettling that everyone who got involved with Fia started behaving strangely, but with the major undertaking of searching for the Black Dragon ahead of us that day, I stopped dwelling on it and changed my mindset.
And later, I realized that had been the right choice.
Because what we experienced that day was such a huge incident that it swept everything else aside, reducing all my previous worries to trifles. There was no point wasting time on them.
That huge incident... In other words, Fia's behavior after encountering the Black Dragon was completely beyond reason.
From beginning to end.
First, there were all the suggestions she gave us while hunting Dreamgreen and Flowerhorn Deer.
Even if I gave them the benefit of the doubt and accepted Quentin and Fia's claim that she was simply repeating advice from the Black Dragon, Fia had been far too calm.
Anyone would normally panic and lose their composure when faced with monsters that vicious.
And yet, at every crucial moment, she gave one precise instruction after another.
If all those flawless instructions had been the result of her acting as the Black Dragon's puppet, that would have been incredible in its own way.
Then there was her control of the familiars.
Both Quentin and Fia said it was the Black Dragon's power, but when the familiars accepted the orders, they were looking at Fia, not the Black Dragon.
There's no way I could be mistaken. Fia was the one commanding the familiars.
But if even I noticed, then Quentin, the commander of the Monster Knights, must have noticed as well.
Why did Quentin deliberately lead us to believe it was the Black Dragon's power?
...I'll have to press him about that later.
Then there were the Blue Dragons that came straight for Fia.
I remembered the incident a while back when Cyril got furious over Fia taking command.
The whole thing had started when the commander on the scene was knocked away by a Flowerhorn Deer and left disoriented, with no one left to lead the knights.
Even a B-rank Flowerhorn Deer could immediately identify the commander on the scene and attack them first to throw everyone into confusion.
So why had the S-rank Blue Dragon, which was more intelligent than a Flowerhorn Deer, targeted Fia first instead of me or Quentin?
There was only one answer.
Fia was the most valuable person there.
I couldn't understand what made Fia valuable.
I didn't know, but at the very least, the Blue Dragon had seen value in her.
Fia possessed some overwhelming value that the Blue Dragon could recognize in that brief moment.
And then there was the Black Dragon, which had put itself in harm's way to protect Fia.
The Black Dragon, one of the continent's three great magical beasts and a legendary ancient species, was completely subservient to Fia.
After witnessing the Black Dragon's overwhelming might, I couldn't even imagine how Fia had formed a familiar contract with it. But the fact remained that the absolute Black King obeyed Fia without question.
It protected Fia, fought for her, and even broke off its own horn for her sake.
I especially thought that breaking off its horn at the end went beyond mere subservience.
It was a threatening display, making it abundantly clear that it stood behind Fia.
Fia... just how obsessed with you is that Black Dragon?
I let out a deep sigh without thinking, then cursed inwardly at how so many problems could pile up all at once.
But... a storm of feelings—anger, frustration, and all sorts of other things—raged inside me. In the end, what remained was gratitude toward Fia.
Fia is hiding something.
And all the strange things she'd done up until now must be connected to whatever she's keeping secret.
―――But in the end, Fia is a good person.
Whatever she's hiding must be important to her, but when she has to weigh it against something else, she always chooses the knights' safety over keeping her secret.
She tries desperately to hide something, but when the knights' safety is threatened, she throws everything aside to save them.
As a result, not a single knight died. They were all saved.
Only someone who has faced death could understand how grateful we should be for that.
"...But, you know..."
Though I felt indebted to Fia, the words slipped out before I could stop them.
"With secrets that poorly hidden, isn't what Fia's trying to keep secret going to be exposed for everyone to see any minute now?"
To begin with, Fia doesn't have enough conviction when it comes to keeping things secret.
If you truly want to hide something, you have to see it through no matter what—even if someone dies or you lose something precious. You have to be willing to throw everything away to keep it hidden.
If you can't go that far, then there's no way you'll succeed at covering it up. You might as well give up from the start.
I didn't know how Fia's secret worked, but when the mystery behind a serious problem was finally revealed, it often turned out to be very simple.
Fia's secret, and the reason for her strange behavior, were probably simple, too.
And perhaps they weren't all that important to anyone but Fia herself.
There are plenty of cases where someone thinks a secret is a huge deal, only for everyone else to hear it and find it trivial.
I wanted to tell her that, but after seeing the shock she'd just suffered, I couldn't simply tell her to talk about it.
Fia had probably been agonizing over whether she should confess her secret to us... and in the end, it had made her so unwell that she'd collapsed.
It must have been such a serious issue for Fia that merely considering whether to confess it had triggered a shock response.
And after agonizing over it, she said she couldn't tell us.
―――Because she didn't trust me enough to tell me.
As I recalled the scene, I bit down hard on my lip, painfully aware of my own inadequacy.
Fia had collapsed on the ground, sweating profusely and looking as though she could barely breathe.
She kept breathing in short, labored gasps with her eyes closed, and the moment she could finally speak, she said outright that she couldn't tell me anything.
I remembered the severity of Fia's gaze as she looked at me as if glaring.
―――Those were the eyes of someone trying to protect something.
Judging by everything Fia had done up until now, whoever she was trying to protect was probably someone other than herself.
And, shamefully enough, that someone she was trying to protect must include me...
Fia had revealed some power she'd been hiding, putting the knights' lives—my life—ahead of keeping it secret.
And yet I, the person she'd saved, was so unreliable that she couldn't even confide her worries in me.
On top of that, Fia intended to protect me...
I let out a deep sigh from the bottom of my lungs. My arms, crossed over my chest, tightened.
...What a joke of a knight commander.
I can't even protect one rookie knight or let her share her worries with me.
That's why...
―――I have to become stronger.
I have to become a sincere, understanding knight.
So that if Fia ever needs me, she'll be able to rely on me properly this time.
So that the next time we encounter a powerful monster, I can at least be a shield for Fia.
―――That's the duty of someone who calls himself a knight commander...