Chapter 49

To put it simply, it turned out Rosalind was a massive fan of mine.

To be precise, she’d apparently fallen in love at first sight after watching this year’s Imperial Match—an event where I personally felt I’d gone a bit overboard—and had been desperate to study under me ever since. Being the target of such a straightforward, admiring gaze was honestly making me feel a bit itchy. Inside the knight order, I’m usually called a freak rather than praised, after all.

So, I did my best to calm her down as she rode a total high, spouting embarrassing things like, “You are the person I respect most in the world!” and “To be born in the same era as you is the height of my honor!!” Meanwhile, I gave a little flick to the forehead of Amal, who had been inspired by the sword techniques she’d just witnessed and started practicing some truly terrible swings. Finally, I led them both over to a nearby bench to sit.

“…Alright, now that my lovely juniors have settled down, shall we move on to the general review?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Understood.”

If things ended with me just going on a rampage, there would have been no point in bringing them together. That said, in this day and age, if you act all high and mighty saying things like “Steal my techniques!” or “Find your own work!”, you’ll find yourself treated like a nuisance before you know it. I intended to explain things as kindly as possible to these two newcomers.

“What I showed Rosalind was a combat style using only Water Sweep and Red Sparrow. Rosalind-san, how did it feel to be on the receiving end?”

“Let me see…”

Rather than giving a boring answer like “You were just really strong,” Rosalind placed a finger on her chin as if carefully examining her memories.

“…I couldn’t land a single hit. The attacks that could be dodged were dodged, and even when my linear slashes connected, they were parried away by Water Sweep. Then, a single thrust through the opening… I felt the essence was quite different from the usual style of the Kingdom Offensive Draw-Sword Style.”

“Exactly. The Kingdom Offensive Draw-Sword Style is fundamentally about attacking aggressively, stripping away the opponent’s defense, and crushing them. In contrast, the style I used is a reactive one—observing the opponent’s move and turning the tide once an opening appears.”

“It’s pretty plain, isn’t it, Senior?”

“What a blunt thing to say… Amalthea-san, you are technically the one being taught, are you not? At the very least, show some manners…”

“Eh, Senior’s surprisingly good at going with the flow, so I think it’s fine! Besides, I think Rosalind-san is just too stiff.”

‘Sigh, this girl… I really struggle with this overly carefree attitude of hers…’

The serious Rosalind and the frivolous Amalthea. They were polar opposites, but I hoped they could get along. As someone who leaned toward being a loner with only two friends in my own class, I believed the more friends, the better.

Now, while Amal was just blurting out whatever mindless thought came to her, her blunt assessment of it being a “plain tactic” was, in a way, spot on. It’s a fact that this tactic lacks the flashiness of a proactive assault, and since the only offensive move is a single thrust, one might struggle depending on the opponent’s compatibility.

However, that doesn’t mean the tactic is inferior.

“Rosalind-san, you said before we started that using only two techniques was underestimating you. But look at it from the other side: in combat, it’s a style that lets you focus entirely on just two techniques without having to worry about a mountain of other options. Its versatility is low, but someone who masters a tactic like this is the biggest headache to deal with.”

For a sword, the thrust is the attack with the longest reach. By that same token, the opening is huge if it’s parried, but if the opponent’s reaction is delayed by even a single step, it’s a guaranteed finishing blow that’s impossible to recover from.

Newcomers tend to get obsessed with learning a high volume of secret techniques, but in actual combat, the ultimate key is how you choose and discard the techniques you know. As long as the tactic itself is perfected, one can perform at the top level even with only a few techniques.

“Unleash a thrust only when you’re certain it will hit, and when you can’t, focus entirely on surviving through evasion. If the opponent doesn’t attack, they’ll eventually be forced to make a move against you, and when they do, you just focus on aiming for a Water Sweep counter.”

“A pure counter tactic… I see. If the premise is to never expose unnecessary openings yourself, then a diverse range of offensive moves would actually become a shackle.”

“That’s the idea. If you keep your posture centered on being able to fire off a thrust at any moment, there’s no tactic more annoying than this.”

“I am amazed that Varna-sama has studied such a tactic. Did you learn it through textbooks or through actual sparring? What other tactics do you—”

“W-well, uh…”

The intensity in Rosalind’s eyes as she leaned in—looking like she was ready to whip out a notebook—was a bit scary. It was a fear similar to when I was a kid and got chased by a dog for no particular reason. Chasing something that runs is a dog’s instinct, and I felt like she might be a “carnivorous” girl with that same kind of instinct.

Well, that part was fine—actually, maybe it wasn’t, but I’d put that aside for now—as I looked at my other problem child and sighed.

“…Um, Sen—”

“In short: dodge the opponent’s attacks like crazy, and when you think ‘now’s the time,’ give ’em a sharp poke. Did you get that, Amal? You’ve been failing to keep up with the conversation for a while now.”

“You read my mind before I even said anything!?”

“It’s written all over your face. In a neat bulleted list. Quite the elegant handwriting, too.”

“Ehehe, I wouldn’t go that far… wait, were you just indirectly calling me a dummy?”

I wasn’t just “indirectly” doing it. I wasn’t going to let her make excuses when smoke was practically puffing out of her head. Rosalind, having noticed her peer’s “clunker” status, was also looking at Amal with a somewhat haggard expression. Though, she needed to reflect on herself as well.

“Anyway, Amal. From now on, give up on ‘swinging’ your sword. If you focus your training specifically on the trio of thrusting, parrying, and evading, you might actually become useful. If you want to be a knight, burn that into your brain.”

“Oh, so that’s what you meant when you said to give up on swinging… Got it, Senior!! Someday, I’ll master a brilliant sword style where I fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee!!”

Snap! Amal gave a slightly playful salute with a dazzling smile. It was a radiant look, but I was eternally worried about whether she could actually keep up once the real teaching started. Honestly, starting now, I felt there was a ninety percent chance she wouldn’t make it in time for the exam.

However, since her moods fluctuate so wildly, I figured it was better to keep that fact to myself for now to help her grow.

“Well, that covers Amal… the problem is Rosalind-san.”

“…Me, sir?”

She waited for my words solemnly, without showing even a flicker of anxiety.

It was as if she were declaring she was fully prepared for any kind of reprimand.

That said, I didn’t plan on getting angry. I just wanted to give her a bit of a “preachy” talk to test the strength of her so-called resolve. I’d been soft on Amal, but if Rosalind couldn’t answer my questions properly, I intended to cut her down with some fairly merciless words.

“I can tell your swordsmanship is good. You have some naive spots, likely from a lack of experience fighting opponents of equal or greater skill, but with your current level, you’d have a chance of winning even against a mid-tier knight.”

“Your words are more than I deserve.”

Rosalind gave a quiet bow without showing any joy. She might have thought it was flattery, but the sharpness of her offensive and the lack of openings had exceeded my expectations. Honestly, at this point, she might already be beyond Nagi and could put up a good fight against Senior Garmon.

“However, the Royal Foreign Hazardous Species Countermeasures Knights doesn’t want people who are just strong and good at studying. You seem to want to join our order, but I have grave doubts about whether you can truly go through with that path without running away from the work.”

“…!”

Rosalind’s eyelid flickered. It was the “it’s finally here” look.

I felt a bit bad about sounding like I was blaming her, but I was going to treat this like a high-pressure interview.

“Did you decide you wanted to go to the Royal Foreign Hazardous Species Countermeasures Knights just because you wanted to learn under me?”

“No. I won’t say that isn’t part of it, but it’s also because I lament the future of that knight order, which is forced to stand on the front lines of the orc conflict—”

“Really? If I were in a different order instead of the Pig-Hunt Knights, would you still have sought to join the fight against the orcs? Personally… I don’t think you would have.”

Her passion was considerable, but it always had a singular destination. She didn’t look like the type of person who was flighty enough to have her eyes stolen by anything else. Before she looked at the job, she must have looked at the person.

Rosalind gasped for a fraction of a second at my question, but then she answered without faltering.

“It is not a lie. However, I will not deny that the reason I began to lament the order’s future was because you were there. To add to that, a contributing factor was the image I had that one’s blade is truly honed only in a place closest to actual combat.”

People who tell blatant lies are a pain, but being too honest can be a problem too. I’d intended to dig out her true feelings, but seeing that secrets wouldn’t work, she’d disclosed them herself. And negative information, at that.

They say honesty is a virtue, but there’s never been an era where honesty was the best policy. I felt like she wasn’t seeing the knight order so much as she was prioritizing an image of herself belonging to it.

“Then I’ll tell you this: whether or not you stand on the front lines is for the order to decide. It’s not your call. Whether you participate in actual combat is irrelevant to the order’s needs. After all, our order has mountains of work other than fighting orcs.”

“Are you saying that with my level of skill, I cannot be entrusted with the fight against the orcs?”

“Whether or not I can entrust it to you doesn’t matter.”

In the first place, she was making a fatally flawed assumption.

Concepts like being “weak” or being a “newbie”—those kinds of justifications simply didn’t exist in our knight order. Under Commander Luger’s exquisite management, everyone was forced to endure grueling labor in equal measure. If she couldn’t understand that, she would surely meet the same end as my former classmates.

“Once you actually enter the order and find yourself rotated through chores day after day, in an environment where what you learned at school is hardly put to use, and you realize it’s a place where you can’t do what you want to do… will you still be able to keep your sense of duty toward orc subjugation burning?”

“I… I—”

There, Rosalind’s words failed her.

She really was an all-too-honest girl. Anyone good at flattery or navigating society would have answered with a “yes” instantly. In the upper classes where lying was an art form, she was perhaps a uniquely pure existence. That was exactly why she needed to think deeply about what was to come—

“You won’t know until you try, so is there really any need to worry about it right now?”

Suddenly, an incredibly carefree voice interrupted, shattering the atmosphere of my high-pressure interview.

“Amal, you really…”

“?”

Amal stared back with a metaphorical question mark floating over her head, as if she truly didn’t see the problem. Hearing that innocent remark from the girl who had been subtly left out of the loop until now, I let out a sigh at just how optimistic she was. This conversation was supposed to apply to her too, yet she had absolutely zero vision for the future.

While I stood there winded by her pace, Rosalind looked at Amal as if she were seeing a creature beyond belief. It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t believe the statement itself, but rather that the very idea had never even occurred to her. A serious person like her certainly wouldn’t have been able to derive that answer.

…Well, it was a fairly airheaded response, so there was no need to emulate it.

“I mean, there are plenty of things you just don’t know until you try! Even when I was entering the Officers’ Academy, my family told me it was impossible, but I actually got in and I’m managing somehow, right?”

“You’re literally cornered right now, though! Weren’t you begging me to kill you when we first met!?”

“I managed to bounce back thanks to you, Senior! And if it still seems impossible, I figured I’d just rely on Rosalind-san!”

“Eh, me!?”

Amal took the hands of the greatly surprised Rosalind, her eyes sparkling with expectant hope. Rosalind looked like she honestly wanted to refuse, but she seemingly couldn’t bring herself to say “no” to Amal’s face.

However, this was an unexpected ambush.

Now that she mentioned it, I had also inflated my own internal image of what a knight should be, but once I became one, I just kept going despite thinking, This isn’t what I imagined. All my peers from back then were gone, but when things don’t work out, you can just accept that they didn’t work out. Given her family background, it wasn’t like she’d end up on the streets if she quit being a knight.

“In fact! Rosalind-san, if you get into trouble, you should just rely on Senior too! If it’s Senior… Senior will figure something out!”

“Don’t go raising expectations so irresponsibly!! I mean, I’ll look after my juniors, but still!!”

“See! He said he would!! He said he’d look after us!!”

“…Varna-sama! You were teasing me, weren’t you!? Hmph, now that I know that, as long as I get into the knight order, I’ve got you! I shall rely on you to my heart’s content, Varna-sama ♪”

“Dammit, she got me to commit!?”

The strongest knight in the kingdom had just blurted out something careless and suffered an utter defeat at the hands of two young juniors.

These days, I’m constantly reminded that winning an argument against two young girls is more difficult than getting an acquittal in a situation where you’re 99% guilty.

In the end, having lost to the “girly” counterattack of my two juniors who had completely allied with each other halfway through, I gave them both some sword instruction. Amal didn’t quite manage to perfect the two secret techniques that same day, but I suppose they at least took some sort of shape. As a small revenge, I pushed the task of teaching Amal onto Rosalind, who had managed to grasp the counter-tactic just by watching and mimicking me.

I would be on leave tomorrow as well, but training at the Officers’ Academy was set to resume. I likely wouldn’t have much time to meet them from tomorrow onward. In that case, someone else had to teach Amal in my stead. Rosalind seemed to struggle with keeping pace with those around her, so this might actually be a good opportunity for her to re-evaluate herself.

“Still, even though it was my day off, I’m exhausted…”

While thinking about how I shouldn’t just casually drop by my old alma mater—essentially negating the entire day’s encounter—I headed toward our order’s headquarters, located on the edge of the Royal Capital, relatively close to the Royal Magic Research Institute.

At the headquarters, there were fully private rooms for the knights, separate from the Motive Carriage quarters, but for members of an order who spent most of their lives inside a Motive Carriage, those rooms were basically storage units. Since I also treated mine as a storage room, my feet naturally led me toward the Motive Carriage hangar where I usually stayed.

However, waiting for me at the hangar was a Motive Carriage undergoing large-scale maintenance and a sign that read “Under Renovation.” Usually, I’d step inside even if it was under maintenance during my time off, but this time the scale was clearly different.

Parts were being carried in one after another, while others were being hauled out. Engineers from the Research Institute were bustling back and forth. Judging by the scale, it looked like they were even messing with the internal wiring.

Spotting a familiar face among the people scurrying about, I called out to him, feeling a bit bad for interrupting.

“Hey, Rai! What’s all this commotion?”

“Ah, Varna-san!! …Hey, sorry, go on ahead without me. I’ll be done here in about three minutes.”

Rai, having excused himself to a nearby engineer, ran over without a hint of annoyance. Even though the sun was setting, he looked more energetic than usual, likely because this was a site where he could truly show off his skills.

“Sorry for interrupting your work.”

“No, no, I have enough time to explain the situation. After all, this renovation is a massive undertaking that’ll take at least another two days to finish!”

“I see… but why the sudden change?”

“Well, actually, it seems our next mission will be at the northern tip of the kingdom. It’s an emergency renovation to make sure we’re equipped for cold-weather regions.”

“Huh. Cold-weather regions… wait, cold-weather regions?”

I felt a strange sense of dissonance.

If it was a mission, there was a nearly 100% chance it was an orc subjugation task.

However, that made things a bit odd.

Orcs were a mysterious race with remarkably little body hair. Therefore, there were hardly any confirmed sightings of them in cold-weather regions; the established theory was that they didn’t inhabit the snow-covered northern parts of the continent.

‘In that case, could it be… the next mission isn’t orc subjugation?’

With the situation involving Veera, it wasn’t an impossible thought. It was the end of the year when work was usually light, but there was a strong scent in the air that this year’s Royal Foreign Hazardous Species Countermeasures Knights were about to be thrust into a difficult problem right away.