Chapter 77
#77 Thief Dauphin (21) - Farewell Beneath the Full Moon
For the lords of the Kingdom of Birka, the Sarnos Knight Order was a force to envy.
“Ah, if only I had a knight order like that, no, even just one knight…!”
“Damn it, I’m not even asking for a full knight. If only I could at least poach an apprentice knight…!”
When describing the value of a tier-4 knight, people often use the phrase ‘one man to a hundred.’
It means that having a single knight of that level is the same as commanding a hundred soldiers.
Of course, one knight can’t literally take on a hundred men head-on and win, but if you add hit-and-run tactics, morale collapse through intimidation, and the like, ‘one man to a hundred’ isn’t all that absurd.
In that sense, the military strength of House Sarnos, which possessed over a hundred tier-4 knights, was practically a symbol of terror to most lords.
Suppose a lord made House Sarnos angry and they sent out a hundred knights.
To oppose that, you’d need to prepare ten thousand troops, and with fewer than a few dozen standing soldiers, there was no chance; naturally, you’d have to conscript serfs or commoners.
The moment you resorted to this ‘conscription,’ the lord was already at a loss.
Because the labor force that should be working in the territory and paying taxes had to throw itself into an activity that produced no value.
Worse, you had to feed and house the conscripted soldiers, and depending on the situation, even issue weapons and equipment.
A ruthless lord might even try to save money here by not feeding them and telling them to get their own weapons, but that only meant they couldn’t function as soldiers and shortened his own lifespan.
Separate from actual combat, simply gathering and maintaining a military force dealt a tremendous blow to the finances.
By contrast, what about the knight order?
The main force alone consisted of a hundred regular knights. Even including apprentice knights, attendants, and the like, it was only a few hundred at most.
No matter how much better knights ate and rested than conscripts, there was no comparison in terms of supplies or upkeep.
And even if you gathered ten thousand men, that still didn’t mean you could truly fight the knight order on equal footing.
Conscripts basically had no motive to fight, so the moment the situation seemed even slightly unfavorable, they would immediately choose surrender or flight; to prevent that, commanders and agitators had to keep encouraging and directing them over and over.
So if the knights picked off those people first, the remaining troops could collapse as an army no matter how many were left.
To stop that, you had to gather even more troops so the knights couldn’t recklessly break through, and that in turn led to heavier supply burdens.
In the end, stopping a knight order with soldiers was a spectacularly bad deal, so the best approach was to raise your own knights, and House Sarnos was the family that treated knights best in the kingdom.
A special mana-cultivation method handed down in House Sarnos. Enormous financial rewards.
Added to that was the prestige of being known as the kingdom’s strongest, so those with status and talent in the kingdom flocked to House Sarnos, and even those who couldn’t become regular knights would rather remain as apprentice knights than swear loyalty to some other lord.
To avoid being beaten down by the knight order, the lords were inevitably forced to bow and scrape before Count Sarnos, and that allowed House Sarnos to wield tremendous influence throughout the kingdom.
Of course, it was not without cost.
The tax rate in the territory ruled by House Sarnos was brutal, and the wealth they squeezed out was not reinvested into domestic affairs but poured entirely into strengthening and maintaining military power.
Until now, that had been fine.
The benefits the knight order brought were that huge.
But now, it was no longer the case.
“The Sarnos Knight Order lost? No, where? Don’t tell me the Redvel family got involved? …What? They went after one thief and got robbed instead? What kind of bullshit is that?”
“A large number of the dispatched knights are dead or beyond recovery. The order captain too has become a man who can never pick up a sword again? And you’re saying that was done by Lebruk’s guards? You’re bringing me this as intelligence? Investigate again!”
“The knight order kept making one humiliating blunder after another against a thief, then tried to pin the blame on others, and when that plan was exposed, they tried to slaughter the townspeople? …Why? No, what kind of logic leads to that? What on earth happened in between?”
When the events in Lebruk were first made known, people dismissed them as nothing but a false rumor.
They were that unbelievable.
However, Lebruk was one of the kingdom’s great cities, and there were far too many witnesses this time to dismiss the incident as simple gossip.
In due course, those who learned that the knight order had truly been defeated, and how immense the humiliation had been in the process, let out hollow laughs.
The level of disgrace was astonishing.
“You, you pieces of trash! What are you doing! Prepare the troops immediately!!”
The Count of Sarnos, who had become a laughingstock across the kingdom, flew into a fury and tried to march on Lebruk at once, but his retainers desperately restrained him.
“I-It can’t be done, my lord!”
“They’re the ones who smashed the knight order head-on! There’s no guarantee we can win just by raising new troops!”
“If we lose again this time, the damage will be beyond control!!”
“Lose? Against just one city, you’re saying I, House Sarnos, would lose!!”
The count shouted with a face flushed red, but the retainers who would normally have been reading his mood and backing down by now did not so readily follow his words.
Only then did the count realize it.
“These bastards are treating me like a toothless tiger!”
Even though the knight order sent to Lebruk had been defeated, House Sarnos’s power had not vanished entirely.
There were guards scattered across the regions, House Sarnos’s private soldiers, and although the knight order itself had lost more than half its members, some of its personnel still remained.
Even now, he was still one of the kingdom’s leading military powers.
But that no longer meant much.
His knight order had already lost the title of strongest in the kingdom, and its reputation had crashed to the ground.
What House Sarnos had lost this time was not merely a fighting force, but the very symbol of being the strongest in the kingdom.
To strip away the old-fashioned wording and state it more bluntly and plainly, it would be this.
─Who would ever fear some thug who got beaten up like a dog by an apartment security guard?
House Sarnos, which had ruled solely through violence and the fear based on it, was a house that had no choice but to fall once violence was turned back on it.
“Enough already, just prepare the army now!!”
Sensing that, the Count of Sarnos raised his voice even higher.
He could not afford to hold back here.
Even if he had to burn the remaining troops to ashes, he had to somehow wipe out those rebels in Lebruk.
If he did not prove his strength, the future awaiting him was nothing but slowly becoming a laughingstock and being pushed into obscurity.
At least in terms of the logic of power, the count had a fairly sharp grasp of the core issue.
If the count had been the kingdom’s one and only power.
No, if there had at least been no external enemy, that alone might have solved the problem.
At the point where he had pointlessly lost the order captain, the count had no way to do anything about Dahlia, but Dahlia likewise had no way to protect people from the army the count had resolved to raise.
However, he was not the absolute ruler of the kingdom, and his rival was not a gentleman who would pretend not to notice an enemy’s exposed weakness.
“M-My lord! House Redvel is acting suspiciously! They’ve suddenly begun moving troops openly near the border of our territory!”
“What? What does that mean! On what pretext!!”
“Th-they say it’s to wipe out a monster pack that has been growing stronger as it moves between territories! We’ve also received a request for cooperation!”
“Nonsense! We need to request mediation from the Crown Prince at once—”
“Th-that... even His Highness the Crown Prince has instead advised us to cooperate with their side....”
“…The Redvel Marquis. That bastard—the beast-stinking old snake!!”
The count trembled all over.
He was not worried about an invasion by House Redvel.
That was not that crafty man’s style.
Instead, the Redvel Marquis would use every excuse like this to keep the count pinned down so he could not move his army recklessly.
Just preventing him from taking immediate action would be enough for House Sarnos, now stripped of charisma and cohesion, to collapse on its own.
He knew.
He knew that sinister trick all too well.
He knew it, but had no way to deal with it.
The count collapsed in place, his face turning deathly pale.
It felt as if the world before his eyes had gone black.
***
News of House Sarnos’s situation spread to Lebruk once again.
Those who had been bluffing with trembling legs, daring anyone to come at them, let out sighs of relief without even realizing it, and the people who had been on edge also slowly returned to their daily lives when, contrary to expectation, nothing else of note happened.
Among the commoners, there were even some who argued that they should cut off the heads of everyone living in the upper-class district, but the voices agreeing with that were not very loud.
Part of it was because the citizens’ anger had already been somewhat relieved by Dauphin’s string of crimes, and part of it was because Dahlia herself opposed indiscriminate slaughter.
From Lebruk’s point of view, this was good news.
If the commoners had gone on a rampage and cut off the heads of all the nobles and wealthy people, the rulers of other territories would have thrown everything they had into stopping them without a second thought, but because that did not happen, room for compromise appeared.
“We only resisted because the knight order first attempted that massacre. We have no intention of toppling the kingdom itself.”
Among the people living in the upper-class district, those whose crimes were particularly severe left Lebruk together with the remnants of the knight order, while the others began mingling with the commoners, taking care to mind their behavior.
There were still dissatisfied people, and plenty of problems remained, but at least the immediate crisis had been averted.
That was why Dahlia was able to slip out of her lodging for a while late at night and have some private time.
“…You’re planning to leave?”
“What, an undercover investigation?”
Dauphin shook his head as if he’d been outplayed.
For a thief caught by a guard while trying to escape through a window at dead of night, it was quite a cheerful gesture.
Come to think of it, he always had seemed that way.
Dahlia looked at Dauphin.
Below his right shoulder, only the sleeve remained, hanging loose and fluttering.
Noticing Dahlia’s gaze, Dauphin shrugged with a teasing smile.
“Don’t worry. To me, this is nothing more than a trivial injury.”
“If losing an arm is trivial, then what’s not trivial?”
“Why, the neck, of course. In that sense, stopping the citizens’ rampage was a very good thing. The flames of revolution are hot, but sometimes they burn even the revolution itself to ashes. I want to remain a thief, not a revolutionary!”
“So after turning the city into this mess, you’re just going to run off? Who’s supposed to handle the aftermath?”
“A thief is one who challenges order and brings it down. It’s not a good idea to take part in setting order right.”
She had heard those words before.
It was unclear whether she had heard them from “him” or from “Dauphin”... or perhaps even that distinction was meaningless.
“Go on, build them yourself. Those things you’ve always kept in your heart, but had to pile up because reality got in the way—try bringing them to life in the real world.”
Well, look at that.
He had no intention of hiding it anymore at all.
Dahlia pouted.
“Did you approach me with that in mind from the beginning?”
“The spark was an accident, but I won’t deny that I steered things a bit after that.”
“What a bad man. Playing with people’s hearts is truly vile.”
“Well, isn’t that what a thief is? A kind, earnest, strict man can’t possibly be a thief in the first place.”
It was a situation in which she should have been angry.
She understood that in her head.
And yet, for some reason, Dahlia felt laughter welling up in her chest.
Was it because she had been swept along by Dauphin’s ever-cheerful atmosphere, or because she was intoxicated by the magic of the full moon hanging in the sky?
“That’s right. You’re a bad, faithless man who loves chaos more than order. You’re truly suited to being a thief.”
But precisely because he was that kind of person, he had been able to resolve the long-standing contradictions that had piled up in this city.
He had been able to dig without hesitation into the grudges and pain that order and law could never resolve.
He had done what Dahlia could not, and in the end even changed Dahlia herself.
“You told me to create order. To fix for myself what I had thought was unreasonable. But I’m not that perfect, and I’m not that smart.”
I will surely make many mistakes.
Maybe the laws and order she had changed because she thought they were right would make even more people suffer.
“I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid of the power I have, and I’m afraid that what I think is right will be taken by others as arrogance. I’m afraid that I... that my dad and I will become the ‘monster’ we tried so hard to deny.”
The order that had restrained Dahlia and, at the same time, given her a clear path was gone now.
If one day she took the wrong path and someone pointed it out to her, would she truly be able to admit it honestly?
Would she perhaps ignore the criticism and stubbornly insist that she was right?
“─Rest easy. If you take the wrong path, then I’ll come to punish you. If you don’t, then I suppose I can leave you with a few kind words.”
An unshakable declaration.
At Dauphin’s words, full of sincerity, Dahlia briefly widened her eyes... then lowered her head.
Without the visor that always covered her face, it would have been hard to hide her expression otherwise.
I am a guard, and you are a thief.
You are far freer than I am, while I am bound tighter than anyone else.
Because you are so opposite to me in every way, I truly envied you, was jealous of you, and loved you.
I want to hold you by force, but that would surely be something I must not do.
Because the you who lost your freedom by being held by me would surely not be the same you I loved.
Suppressing the overflowing feelings and the trembling in her voice, Dahlia raised her head.
And she met his eyes with a confident expression.
The thief said.
“Then until next time, Guard Dahlia.”
The guard said.
“Let’s meet again someday, Thief Dauphin.”