Chapter 52
An attendant knight is a magic knight's squire.
Those who repeatedly fail to make the grade at the training corps and cannot pass the official magic knight examination choose this as a second-best way to become magic knights.
It is a system that allows them to receive a magic knight's commission after serving for five years as an attendant knight to a magic knight and gaining field experience.
Officially, like apprentice knights who are academy students, they are treated as quasi-knights rather than full-fledged magic knights, but in reality their circumstances are incomparably worse than those of academy students.
The practice that best represents this is the pernicious custom known as the ‘initiation ceremony.’
The method is simple: unlimited sparring with the magic knight one serves.
Except without using barrier stones.
Under the excuse that this was no longer a training camp but a real battlefield where life and death hung in the balance… it was simply one-sided assault.
“Kraaagh!!”
And now.
Two ‘Rounds’ were undergoing their ‘initiation ceremony’ in an empty training ground without barrier stones.
“…I see you didn’t become a Round for nothing.”
Rex muttered as he rolled his stiff shoulder.
Even though they were nearly seven levels apart, Estelle and Rex were both Rounds.
Estelle Schwelbach’s ‘initiation ceremony’ did not follow the one-sided pattern typical of most initiation ceremonies.
She was at least capable of trading blows with him. Estelle was being pushed back one-sidedly, but she was not being beaten completely helplessly.
“Huff, huff….”
“Get up.”
Rex spoke quietly to Estelle, who was holding herself up on trembling legs with her halberd planted against the ground.
If this had been one of the other magic knights’ initiation ceremonies, he would have rushed over and kicked the attendant knight mercilessly.
‘…He’s going easy on me. Clearly.’
Estelle thought as she looked at Rex with trembling eyes.
She, too, was a magic knight who had served on the front lines for two years. She had seen other magic knights assault their attendant knights under the pretext of an initiation ceremony more times than she could count.
She had even stopped some of them herself when they went too far. On one occasion, matters had nearly come to blows with a magic knight who had brazenly picked a fight with her, but Rex had personally stepped in to stop it.
Of course, that magic knight was sent to the guardhouse.
Rex, who had been quietly watching her, said,
“I’ll say it again: you can quit anytime you want. Give up the foolish idea of becoming an attendant knight and return to your proper place.”
“…Hng!!”
Instead of answering, Estelle panted and kicked off the ground.
“Haa.”
Rex sighed and drew his magic sword.
Estelle’s halberd plunged into the earth. It cleaved through the ground and surged back up as easily as a scoop through half-melted ice cream, with a red-hot rock clinging to its head.
A derivative fusion of fire-attribute magic and sustained formula magic: Lava Magic.
“Haaaaaah!!!”
The halberd, wrapped in red-hot, boiling lava, descended upon Rex from above.
-Clang!!
A diagonal slash rising from the lower left to the upper right knocked the halberd back upward.
Like someone lightly humoring a baby’s antics.
“Ugh…!”
“You must have heard it again and again when you were chosen as a candidate for the Rounds.”
Rex, who had stepped into Estelle’s guard, spoke quietly.
“The meaning of being a knight who stands beside the king. If you truly intend to bear that name, you must be prepared to devote even the rest of your life to it.”
-Clang!!
Rex’s left fist slammed into Estelle’s solar plexus.
“Guk…!”
It felt as though her heart had stopped. Estelle gasped and collapsed to her knees on the spot.
It felt as though a hole had been punched through the center of her chest. He must have struck the exact center of her steel armor with his bare hand, without even coating it in mana, yet the force was still this overwhelming.
Rex said to the choking Estelle,
“You know you can’t quit simply because it’s difficult or because you don’t want to do it. There are only two ways to stop being a Round: quit being a magic knight altogether, or die on the battlefield.”
“….”
“And you rejected both of them.”
Rex said as he pulled his slightly loosened leather glove tight.
“If you don’t want either option, then stand up. Estelle Schwelbach.”
“…I don’t know.”
Estelle muttered from where she had collapsed.
“The battles I led from the vanguard ended in one crushing defeat after another. A junior I cherished deserted and was expelled. A friend was beheaded and died in a snowy wilderness thousands of miles away.”
“….”
“Someone like me, who couldn’t save even one cherished junior or a friend I shared a bond with—do I really have the right to call myself a Round? Someone like me, who has done nothing but lose whenever I fight, can I really dare stand beside the king?”
She did not cry. She had already shed all her tears long ago, leaving not a single drop inside her.
She knew it was nothing more than a fit of self-pity. But Estelle needed an answer.
“…What am I supposed to do?”
Rex silently looked down at Estelle, who muttered in a cracked voice with her head bowed.
“…I don’t know.”
Rex opened his mouth.
“I don’t know enough about the situation you’re in to understand it as well as you do, and even if I did, I couldn’t tell you what to do. That is your own problem. It isn’t something someone else can solve for you.”
Rex continued looking down at Estelle as he spoke.
Estelle did not answer. After hesitating for a moment, Rex spoke quietly.
“…There’s one thing. I’ll tell you a story from long ago.”
“….”
“It’s a story I’ve never told anyone else.”
Haa. Rex sighed. It was less an emotional sigh than a deep breath.
“…This happened when I was fourteen.”
It was an old story from nearly ten years ago. Although his other memories had grown hazy, the last moment he had spent with her remained as vivid in his mind as a photograph.
“I was an orphan, and I spent my childhood in an orphanage in my hometown.”
This was a well-known story: the fact that Rex, the White-Flame Knight, was an orphan of commoner birth.
He had never particularly tried to hide it, and no one had the nerve to disparage his name over such a trivial background.
“There was a girl my age in the same orphanage. She was my first love, and black hair suited her beautifully.”
Estelle felt puzzled by the opening, which sounded like the beginning of an old romance story.
“So, when I turned fourteen, I confessed my feelings to her. We had known each other well for a long time, and I thought we were closer than friends. I thought it was simply a way to confirm our feelings.”
“….”
“She rejected me. She turned me down brutally. Even now, I remember words so harsh that my heart aches when I think of them.”
Rex let out a hollow laugh. The human heart was truly fickle. Even now, whenever he thought of that time, a faint resentment toward her still poked its head up inside him.
“That year, I left the village and entered the Third Magic Knight Training Corps.”
Rex continued calmly.
“I ran away. I wanted to forget every memory of that girl and escape the awkward situation I was in. I was even consumed by the childish delusion that she would miss me if I did.”
Rex spat the words out self-deprecatingly. After a brief silence, he spoke again.
“…Two years later, I received a letter from a friend back home. I heard that she had fallen ill and was dying. Apparently, dozens of doctors had come to see her, but not one of them knew what to do.”
A sigh escaped him, and then he continued.
“From that day on, I trained like a madman. There were only two ways to leave the training corps: give up halfway and walk out of your own accord, or pass the examination and become a magic knight. But if you chose the former, you were forbidden from ever setting foot in the training corps again.”
“….”
“Even now, I sometimes wonder whether something might have changed if I had quit that training corps then and gone straight back home.”
Rex spoke in a deliberately calm tone.
“I became a magic knight and returned to my hometown. Then I heard that she had been adopted.”
A hollow laugh escaped from above Estelle’s head.
“Adopt a child already on death’s door? That’s absurd. She must have died around then, and they told me a clumsy lie to hide it.”
“…But you don’t know that for certain, do you?”
Unable to hold herself back, Estelle asked quietly. Rex shook his head.
“I’m not a fool. I can tell at a glance from someone’s facial expression whether they’re lying.”
Rex looked down at Estelle and said,
“…That was the price of running away. Rather than face that moment of shame head-on, I chose to flee, and the price was spending the rest of my life tormented by guilt.”
“….”
“In the reality you face, don’t abandon the duty you bear and run away. Think about the future. Don’t do something you’ll regret when you look back on this after many years have passed.”
Biting his lip, Rex added one more thing.
“…Please, whatever you do, don’t end up like me.”
-Click.
The sound of Rex’s magic sword sliding back into its sheath rang out.
“…If you simply need time to think because you want to find an answer, I won’t stop you from calling yourself my attendant knight and doing menial chores. That’s your personal freedom.”
-Tap.
A golden shoulder insignia fell at Estelle’s feet.
“But I cannot allow you to lay down the name of the Rounds and run away.”
Rex’s footsteps gradually faded into the distance. Estelle, who had kept her head bowed until then, slowly reached toward the golden shoulder insignia.
The shoulder insignia, marked with a black sword slash, gleamed red in the evening sunset.
Like a flame.