"So. The subjugation party, is it?"
Vincent asked it with a snort of a laugh, and Ethan nodded.
"That is right."
"Good. A clan head must not say two things out of one mouth. I grant you the authority to raise a subjugation party. You are aware, of course, that you cannot draw off a large number of men?"
"Of course I am."
He had never intended to command a large number anyway.
The sparring match might have refurbished his image, but Ethan was still as good as a child the clan had thrown away.
His standing inside the clan was narrow, to say nothing of the fact that the clan's knights and soldiers, famous for their stubborn spirit, were not likely to take Ethan's orders quietly.
Because from where they stood, the moment they went under Ethan it was as good as a demotion.
'And I've got no confidence I could handle them.'
Having talent for fighting and having command were two entirely different matters.
And controlling a handful of men was on a different plane again from bringing a platoon's worth into full obedience.
'And I've got no intention of taking on a headache.'
This subjugation was not important enough for him to volunteer for something that troublesome and demanding.
Ethan's reason for joining it was something else.
'The Dead Tree.'
A windfall the protagonist comes into at the story's midpoint.
Or an Easter egg.
A blessing that becomes one of the protagonist's many specs.
Ethan intended to intercept it.
'Can't let the protagonist eat it.'
Even at this point, the protagonist would already have eaten several windfalls.
Which meant Ethan had to get stronger than the protagonist by however small a margin. By that logic, the books only balanced if he intercepted a few of the windfalls available here.
Then Morun, who had been hovering near Ethan, shouted.
"Father! So suddenly as this......!"
"Be silent. Do you not see that I am in conversation?"
Vincent turned a cold look on him and Morun faltered, but this time he seemed unable to yield, and he spoke again.
"The subjugation force is already fully composed. If men are to be drawn off all of a sudden......"
"A ten-man unit will be enough."
Ethan said it while Morun was still voicing his objection.
Ethan ran a contemptuous glance over Morun and then looked back to Vincent.
"A ten-man unit...... fewer than I expected. Will that much be enough?"
"It is enough. Only, I will choose the men myself."
"......What did you say?"
"I believe I ought to have at least that much authority. Even if you assigned men to me by force, you know as well as I do that they would not obey my orders."
"......"
Vincent fell silent, deliberated a moment, then spoke.
"Good. But I will attach a condition of my own. Any soldier or knight you pick must consent to the transfer. Otherwise it is no different from conscripting them."
Vincent looked at Morun, who had shut his mouth.
The face that had been soaked in anxiety a moment earlier now brightened.
'Transparent as glass.'
Vincent clicked his tongue inwardly at the pathetic sight and looked at Ethan.
Ethan smiled a little, as though he had expected it all along.
"Very well. Give me a little time. I will have my unit complete within the week."
'Entertaining.'
Vincent felt something strange stir at the spirit in Ethan's manner.
He had taken him for a thoughtless wastrel and nothing more, and he kept on surprising him.
'Whether it is a whim or not, I shall have to watch a while longer.'
But this did not look like a whim.
Vincent looked into Ethan's eyes.
There was not a shred of hesitation or burden in them, only confidence and sharpness.
'An arrogant one.'
But Vincent found himself glad of it.
Arrogance was one of the virtues a noble had to possess.
Conceit and arrogance without grounds would be poison, but Ethan had already proved himself once with a result.
'But once is not enough.'
One proof was hard to call an achievement large enough to paper over everything Ethan had done.
Reckoned honestly, he had only put down his younger brother.
He had only taken the place that should have been his from the start.
That could hardly be counted an achievement.
'Though putting down a mana user is astonishing enough.'
Vincent ran a strange look over Ethan.
The thick lumps of fat were gone, and fine, close-packed muscle wrapped Ethan's body like armor.
"Will you decide here and now?"
Ethan shook his head at the question.
"I could hardly do that. Ask here and no one will come under me. I am not stupid enough to throw away an advantage I have only just won."
Ethan looked around at the crowd.
Knights and soldiers in numbers, and spectators besides. Every last face was a spectacle.
All of them wore expressions soaked in shock and astonishment.
They were faces that wanted to say something, and every mouth was shut.
Because no one could make a disgraceful display in front of the clan head.
"Then I shall take it that permission is granted."
Ethan inclined his head slightly in courtesy to Vincent and turned.
Meeting Morun's eyes as he turned, Ethan murmured under his breath.
'Don't chicken out.'
Morun stood stunned a moment, and then, having evidently read the shape of Ethan's mouth, his face twisted through red and purple.
Ethan passed him without a flicker and gestured to Nade.
"Why are you standing there stiff? Let's go."
"......Yes."
Ethan walked out of the training ground with Nade, and as he moved, the great crowd parted like the Red Sea.
'I like this.'
Those looks.
Eyes soaked in bewilderment.
In his competing days as Ryu Tae-sin he had taken looks like those until he was sick of them, at the end of every fight, and still, every time, they felt new.
It was always a thrill.
The upset pulled off by an underdog everyone had duly expected to lose.
He had always enjoyed that.
'......To think he would pull it off even more perfectly.'
Following behind, Nade looked at Ethan with complicated eyes.
Nade had traded exchanges with Ethan several times.
So of course he knew what level Ethan had reached.
Which is why he had known there was a chance Ethan would win this contest, but practice and the real thing are different.
Ethan had shown better movement in the real thing.
As though everything he had done until then had been nothing but a warm-up.
'He may well cause something in this subjugation too.'
It was a regular subjugation, held every year.
But it had a hidden purpose of its own.
'A test of worth.'
Its use was to judge how a man raised a subjugation force and how much he achieved with it.
The clan head and the orders under his direct command did not set their feet deep into the process.
The intent behind it was plain enough, but the balance of power could already be called settled.
Morun, the eldest, had produced the largest results, and the scale of the subjugation entrusted to him was the largest as well.
'Can he truly produce another anomaly?'
Nade had heard the exchange between Ethan and the clan head.
A unit of ten men. A scale too embarrassing even to call a vanguard.
'Though scale was never the thing that mattered.'
Results in a subjugation were not all about scale.
Somehow it felt as though Ethan would cause one more incident this time.
***
'A subjugation party......'
Ethan returned to his annex and sank into thought.
By rights the confinement should have been ending about now.
But Ethan liked this annex.
'No pressure from outside.'
Ethan called Morun and Karon to mind.
If he lived in the main house he would run into those two more days than not.
It was not that he disliked competition. He welcomed it with both arms, if anything.
But he did not want to go through a nuisance every single day.
Ethan preferred one detonation to a string of small counterattacks.
'Now, the remaining siblings......'
Ethan brought the children of the Blante clan to mind one by one.
First Morun the eldest, then Ethan the second, the third child and younger sister Lisa, and last of all Karon.
'And the one with influence among them......'
Standing within the clan was highest for Morun. Being the eldest son accounted for part of it, and so did having the best force of arms.
The Blante clan is a sword clan, and so it follows the law that the weak are meat for the strong.
'The problem is that he's stupid.'
As he had already seen, Morun was simple and ignorant.
He could not hide what he felt, and he could not see what was coming.
He had narrow-minded obstinacy, and strong pride on top of it.
Those traits were why factions existed that would not back Morun.
'As for me, well, look at me.'
The clan's problem child and its wastrel. In a sense, the worst possible position.
Of all the siblings his temper was the shittiest, and far from talent with the sword he had a trauma about it.
'And that's my position right now.'
As for what blood was left.
'Lisa Blante.'
Her talent for the sword was outstanding and her temper was fire, but she had no interest in the succession and had left for the Academy.
'And she's one of the heroines.'
Ethan set his interest in Lisa aside.
Most of the windfalls the protagonist took out of this clan came by way of Lisa.
'Which are all mine now.'
He intended to leave the protagonist not one grain of what he would have carried off from here.
That was what he had volunteered for the subjugation party to do in the first place.
'Earlier than scheduled, but it shouldn't matter.'
If anything, now could be called the right moment. He could take the windfall with no damage at all.
Ethan walked the annex, turning it over.
'How to do it.'
Winning the sparring match had given him a better image than before.
'That alone isn't enough, though.'
With that alone, drawing manpower was an awkward business.
A knight with real skill would already hold a place somewhere, and anyone with promise in him would not follow Ethan.
'A rotten rope, in other words.'
Rather than get bloodied following Ethan for nothing, they would plainly make one excuse or another and skip the subjugation.
'And I can't just take anybody.'
The 'Dead Tree' he planned to obtain this time was not an easy thing.
To Ethan, at least, who had not yet awakened mana, it was not.
He needed someone who could open the road.
For that, he had to build the party out of men who would follow Ethan's word faithfully.
'Men whose leaving the existing force would raise no comment.'
The knights famous for their stubbornness were out, naturally.
'The soldiers won't be easy either.'
The Blante clan's knights were on the whole a valiant lot.
But they were not men who held their lives cheap.
Of course they knew how to use their heads, and it was plain they would not properly follow Ethan's plan once they heard it.
'So what's left......'
Apprentice knights not yet formally granted knighthood, rank-and-file soldiers freshly into the army, and the servants.
'The servants first, then.'
There would be some.
A few servants whose talent had never flowered.
'His name was......'
A man with so little weight even in the original that it would not come to him.
Unable to produce the name in the end, Ethan asked Nade, who was following behind him.
"Nade."
"Yes, young master."
"You know the servants and the maids well enough, don't you?"
"I do, but...... is something the matter?"
"You happen to know a servant with a long scar on his face?"
Nade turned the question over carefully, then spoke.
"A cut on the face...... Do you mean Hugo?"
Hearing it, a long smile drew itself across Ethan's mouth.
"Yeah. That's him."