Chapter 12
“...What?”
I stopped dead and asked, dazed. Rex looked at me with an unruffled gaze and said,
“Isn’t it?”
“...It’s not...”
I let the end of my sentence trail off.
“….”
I looked up at Rex with my lips pressed tightly together. Rex simply looked back at me.
Silence fell. All I could hear was the unpleasant ringing in my ears and the pounding of my heart. My mind was blank, as though a smoke grenade had gone off. I couldn’t think at all.
“I….”
I opened my mouth haltingly. It was the first time I had realized how difficult it could be to move my lips without being able to utter a proper word.
“Th-the thing is…”
Should I deny it? The thought suddenly occurred to me.
With my mind clouded, I weighed the reasons to answer honestly against the reasons to deny it, as though placing them on a set of scales.
Rex’s insight was clearly exceptional. But that was all. His deductions about my identity and past had been accurate, but neither had any direct connection to the fact that I was the hero. It was nothing more than a conjecture based on circumstantial evidence.
Even if I denied it, Rex would have no way to press me any further.
But what reason did I have to answer honestly? Would it do me any good to step forward now and say, I’m the hero?
It might feel good for a moment. Being placed on a pedestal and revered by others would surely be intoxicating. But what then?
Hadn’t Principal Ludwig said so himself? The burden one had to bear was far heavier than the glory and honor one could gain as a hero.
Besides, if I were questioned about why I had hidden the truth until now, I would truly have nothing to say. It wasn’t as though I had deliberately hidden it.
In the end, all it could do was cause me trouble. By contrast, I could just barely convince myself that denying it wasn’t exactly doing Rex any harm.
All right, I’ll deny it. Sorry, Rex, but… I thought as I opened my mouth.
“...The thing is. Actually….”
Suddenly, my words caught in my throat. A question surfaced in my mind.
Are you trying to lie to Rex again?
Like you did seventeen years ago?
“I….”
My breath caught. Like a child standing before his mother with a switch in hand, I fumbled while avoiding Rex’s eyes.
I squeezed out my voice. Or tried to.
“…Sorry.”
That was when I heard Rex’s voice. Startled, I raised my head.
For the first time, a flicker of confusion crossed his otherwise nearly expressionless face.
“I… I was being thoughtless.”
“N-no.”
I quickly shook my head, stammering. Rex let out a low sigh and continued in a quiet voice.
“I’ve kept you too long. The others must be waiting, so go on ahead.”
“Huh?”
“We’ll… talk about the rest later.”
Saying that, Rex turned around and walked back the way he had come.
So he hadn’t been heading in the same direction as me after all.
… .
I slowly began walking in the opposite direction from Rex.
Rex’s flustered expression kept flickering through my mind.
=
A month earlier.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sir Rex Tenil. I’m Ludwig, the principal of Magnus Academy.”
“…A pleasure to meet you.”
Rex slowly lowered his head in greeting. The elderly, long-bearded man smiled gently as he looked at Rex.
“I never thought the White Flame Knight would willingly take on a position as an instructor at Magnus.”
“You overestimate me.”
Rex shook his head as he answered. Ludwig waved a hand through the air, then tilted the floating kettle over a teacup.
“Difficult, isn’t it? Being a hero.”
As he pushed the steaming teacup toward Rex, Ludwig spoke quietly.
“I know the feeling well. I may not be the White Flame Knight, but even so, I hold the First Seat of the Rounds. I know what it feels like to have the people around you raise you up as a hero.”
“…It isn’t very pleasant.”
Rex gave a hollow laugh. Without even touching the teacup, he continued slowly but firmly.
“At first, I wanted to make a name for myself. I did feel a sense of duty to fulfill my responsibilities as a magic knight and protect the citizens, but I’d be lying if I said I had no personal ambition.”
“….”
“Before I enlisted, I had a childhood friend.”
“Was it a boy?”
“A girl.”
Rex muttered with a bitter smile.
“When I was twelve, I confessed my feelings to her, but she rejected me.”
“Oh dear.”
Ludwig smiled and tilted his teacup.
“She was rather cold about it, too. She said things that were almost cruel.”
“Really? Good heavens.”
“So, wounded in my young heart… I ran away. I packed my things and left, intending to enlist at a border training camp.”
“Oh dear, did her family just let her go?”
“I was an orphan.”
Rex said quietly,
“She was a friend who lived in the same orphanage.”
“…I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
Rex shook his head.
“Back then, I thought I was simply so sad that I wanted to forget everything… but looking back now, I think I had that feeling too.”
After hesitating for a moment, Rex said in a voice tinged with laughter,
“I wanted her to look back at me one more time… I suppose I felt that way, too.”
“That is certainly a thought a twelve-year-old might have.”
Ludwig said with a smile. Rex answered with a smile of his own, then added quietly,
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“….”
“I wish I’d stayed friends with her a little longer.”
The laughter disappeared from Rex’s voice. With his gaze lowered, he muttered rapidly, as though a dam had burst.
“It must have been a little less than a month after I enlisted. A letter arrived. It was written by a friend from the same orphanage.”
“….”
“It said that she had fallen ill. Apparently, she had gone to the river at the edge of the village carrying laundry and collapsed. She was vomiting blood and suffering seizures every day, and they said it seemed to be a fatal illness.”
Rex stopped speaking for a moment and let out a deep sigh. His breath trembled with the effort of suppressing his emotions.
“……I regretted it. I was ashamed that I had run away because I couldn’t face her.”
“…Do you still regret it?”
Ludwig asked. Rex was silent for a moment, then shook his head.
“…No.”
Rex said quietly,
“If I hadn’t been there, the kingdom wouldn’t have made it through that night.”
The Fifty Hours of White Flame.
The reason Rex Tenil came to be called the strongest knight of the age.
A bleak battlefield situation: most of the forces on the front had been lost, and the army had been driven onto the defensive, leaving them no choice but to request reinforcements from the capital.
In that situation, reports came in of a massive surprise attack by the Ain army, which had seized its opportunity.
The only magic knight of upper rank or higher who could take the field was Rex.
Rex had fifty hours. If he failed to hold the final line of defense within that time, the enemy would be allowed to invade the kingdom’s interior—a dire situation.
A miraculous battle in which he overcame every disadvantage and succeeded in holding the final line of defense alone.
‘The Fifty Hours of White Flame’ was the decisive stroke that allowed the Magic Kingdom to hold the Western Front to the very end, and the battle that made Rex Tenil a hero.
‘He’s honest.’
Thus, Ludwig summed him up in a few words.
He was honest and pure. Despite having presumably been pestered by countless hangers-on because of his reputation as a hero, he spoke without the slightest hesitation.
‘If I hadn’t been there, the kingdom would have fallen…’
At first glance, it sounded arrogant. Yet Rex Tenil possessed both the ability and the standing to say such a thing. That was why he spoke honestly.
Rex Tenil was that kind of person.
Yet when it came to teaching others, he would still be a novice.
Fortunately, there happened to be a position just right for him.
=
After meeting Sir Ludwig for the first time, Rex unpacked only a few belongings at his lodgings and immediately headed down to the capital.
He had agreed to assist with the private training of Ayla Lucilante, the eldest daughter of Sir Lucilante.
The agreement was conditional on the Lucilante family providing a letter of recommendation for a position as an instructor at Magnus Academy and covering all expenses incurred in traveling to the capital.
Rex thus spent a month outside the academy, in a guest room prepared at an annex of the Lucilante family estate.
A month later, on the day of the entrance ceremony, Rex headed to Magnus Academy, regretting that he had spent the past month away from the academy.
“…Haru?”
He had never even imagined that he would meet here the childhood friend he had parted from seventeen years ago.
He had thought she was dead. He had been certain they would never meet again.
“…Rex.”
She looked at him in surprise and spoke, her face still no more than a girl’s despite the seventeen years that had passed.
Rex was too shocked to speak. In a trembling voice, he forced out a question.
“…Why are you here?”
He raised a trembling hand and slowly extended it toward her. Haru shrank back as though frightened.
It felt as if time had stopped. A single moment fractured into infinitely many instants, and that instant of reaching his hand out little by little felt eternal.
Biting his lip, Rex reached toward her….
“Oh, isn’t that Sir Rex?”
At that moment, time, which had seemed frozen, returned to normal in an instant.
Countless people who recognized him and his reputation came surging over. Haru was pushed backward by the crowd, and Rex unconsciously furrowed his brows sharply.
But Rex soon suppressed his anger. He knew she was an instructor as well. He had so much to ask, but he could put it off until later.
Surrounded by the crowd, Rex let their many words pass in one ear and out the other as he thought,
About Haru.
It was strange. The more he thought about it, the more things he noticed that didn’t add up.
Why was she wearing Eastern-style clothing? How had she ended up taking a position as an instructor at Magnus Academy? What was that bizarre-looking magic sword at her waist? Had the letter saying his friend from his hometown had contracted a fatal illness been a lie? If it was true, how was she in perfect health?
Rex carefully filed the questions piling up in a corner of his mind. He would ask Haru someday.
And that opportunity came much sooner than he expected.
He happened to run into Haru in the hallway just before his first meeting with the students in the practical training class he would be teaching as an instructor.
Rex peppered Haru with questions. Even so, Haru refused to say where she had been or what she had been doing all this time.
Since Haru, unlike him, wasn’t famous, he had no way of finding out. That lack of information was unbearably frustrating.
How had she cured her illness? How had she ended up on a battlefield? How had she become a magic knight? He had so much he wanted to ask, but unfortunately, Rex had no knack whatsoever for asking about such things tactfully.
It was only after seeing the tears welling in Haru’s eyes, seeming ready to spill at any moment, that Rex belatedly came to his senses.
In the end, Rex fled once again, leaving behind only a one-sided promise to talk later.
Yet even Rex himself had no idea when that ‘later’ would be.