“.......”
Riyan, who had been reading alone in his private room by the light of the moon, gently closed his eyes.
He had just finished reading the history book Haral had brought him.
“Unbelievable.”
Riyan muttered quietly.
Well over a hundred years had passed.
There was no telling why he had opened his eyes again after so many years.
Of course, if he wanted to force the pieces to fit, he could come up with any number of reasons.
Because the king—no, the traitor he now had to call emperor—was still alive.
Naturally, it seemed certain that some wicked magic had contributed to that bizarrely abnormal lifespan.
Who knew? He might already have become a puppet kept barely breathing by the mages.
‘Magic used to be blasphemous.’
Back when he lived and breathed in his past life, mages were beings who brought harm to the world.
To satisfy their own curiosity and desires, they harmed innocent lives, exploited nature, and at times reached for impure powers without hesitation.
That was why mages were called witches, or incarnations of evil, and it had been only natural that, as soon as they were caught, their eyes were gouged out, their tongues cut off, and they were burned at the stake.
And now those who had lived hidden from the world, as if they did not exist, had become the backbone of the Empire.
Of course, the reason stemmed from fear of the armed group called knights—the same fear that had led the current emperor to betray him.
[The Traitor Riyan]
Knight Riyan, who once took up the sword for humanity, forgot that despite his lowly birth he had received His Majesty's grace and been placed in high service, and instead laid hands on wicked power and, with a corrupted soul, turned a sacrilegious blade upon the sacred royal house.......
Fabricated history.
He understood it. Back then, the legion had been ready to follow him into hell itself on his command.
But what had come of it?
Just because they had pulled the diseased tooth called knights, was the tooth that grew in its place healthy?
No. He hadn't lived in this era for long yet, but he could at least tell that this Empire was not in a normal state.
They threw humans to monsters as feed for mere amusement, and cheered at the spraying blood and torn flesh.
Monsters that should have been exterminated had expensive prices put on their heads, and the nobles bought and sold them to satisfy their perverse tastes.
Oppression and control.
The discontent born from it was soothed with entertainment spun from violence and cruelty, while the fear that the one dying could be oneself was planted in the subconscious. Over and over again.
“The emperor, and the mages.”
It was clear these two groups had made the world this way.
Riyan's slender fingers ran over the book. Then he opened it again to a place he had read earlier and marked by folding the corner of the page.
[The Arcana Council]
His Majesty the Emperor, having expelled the knights who wielded impure power, actively appointed to high office the prophets who had long been falsely accused and persecuted by those knights, for the peace and new prosperity of the Empire, and opened a new world to the subjects of the Empire through magic, and the ‘Arcana Council’ founded by these prophets, in accordance with His Majesty the Emperor's will, to build a mighty Empire.......
The Arcana Council.
The Empire's governing body, made up of mages who held the current emperor's absolute trust.
‘In the end, knights.......’
had vanished.
No, to be precise, they had changed.
The knights who once wielded a special power had been buried. Because the mages had misrepresented the power those knights wielded as blasphemous, as something that did nothing but corrupt the soul.
And so, unlike in the past, today's knights borrowed the power of magic and were under the mages' control and surveillance, or so it said.
Of course, it was a lie.
Blasphemous?
To say something so shameless when they had been saved by that very power.
SNAP!
Closing the book, Riyan rose from his seat and approached the open window.
The cold dawn air began to wrap around him. Taking in that chill with his whole body, Riyan raised his head and sent his gaze into the distance.
He saw the lights filling the Imperial Capital like fireflies.
‘Did you want that badly to make me a traitor?’
Riyan's gaze, which had been sweeping over the Imperial Capital, slowly drifted down.
Those lights must stand on the grounds of the kingdom he had once protected.
It was also land that countless people had bled to protect.
Looking back, the emperor's distortion hadn't buried him alone.
It desecrated noble convictions and oaths, and everyone who had crumbled away out of compassion for the kingdom's subjects.
“.......”
Riyan's fury was cold.
He could still see it vividly. Those poor lives that had flung themselves onto the battlefield and turned into flames.
And the ashes left from that burning had become shackles of memory he would carry for the rest of his life.
If someone could answer, he wanted to ask.
Did it truly have to be this way?
Even if it meant covering countless deaths with lies and sacrificing them?
If so.
If that is truly how it is.
“Then maybe it wouldn't be so bad to become a real traitor in this life.”
Riyan's white hair caught the bluish moonlight and began to shine silver.
***
The wind was dry, and the sun hung high in the sky.
Beneath that stinging sunlight, the training grounds were thick with sweat and dust.
From those picking opponents to spar with to gladiators lifting and hurling large sandbags or panting as they conditioned their bodies. Every one of them was busy with their own training.
But all of their movements were subtly listless, and their eyes were directed somewhere else entirely.
Of course, the focus of those gazes was Riyan.
It was only natural.
The sight of him sitting in a nicely shaded spot reading a book was so out of place that the matter of him skipping training was pushed to the side.
For Riyan, of course, it was the obvious choice. His scrawny body wasn't yet at the stage where it could handle training.
Tempering his body in earnest had to wait until he had fully regained his health.
Not that everyone knew and sympathized with that, of course.
“Riyan.”
Someone approached Riyan.
The figure dressed differently from the gladiators was the very person who had brought Riyan the book he was reading, Instructor Haral.
“Instructor Haral.”
“Mind if I sit next to you?”
“Go ahead.”
Riyan tilted his head and closed the book he'd been reading for a moment.
“What about training?”
At Haral's question, Riyan tilted his head.
“Director Berka granted me autonomy.”
“I know. Just asking. But is that book you asked for any good? You looked pretty absorbed in it from a distance.”
“I'm not reading it because it's fun.”
“Then why?”
“I read it because I have to.”
“Because you have to, huh.......”
Scratching the side of his head, Haral sank into thought.
‘What reason could he have to need to read that?’
It wasn't as though he didn't know what was in that book. A stuffy history book. Haral himself had already read it cover to cover four or five times.
Not because he was interested in history, of course.
Most of those raised as gladiators in the school weren't imperial citizens but slaves from the frontier or the provinces, and the hostility they harbored toward the Empire was considerable.
And if that hostility happened to erupt in the arena, where the esteemed gentry were watching, the aftermath would be a real headache.
So, to educate them in advance and prevent problematic remarks, the instructors had to be familiar with the material themselves.
Naturally. You had to know something to teach it.
Though that ‘education’ involved kicks and fists, and looked quite different from the usual kind.
Rubbing his chin, Haral spoke up just in case.
“Well, fine. If you're reading a book like that without being told to, I guess you won't make any pointless mistakes.”
Riyan's head tilted to the side.
“What kind of mistakes do you mean?”
“Simple. You're gladiators, right?”
“We are.”
“Right. Gladiators who give the crowd blood and steel. But if a gladiator like that forgets his place and starts going on about how the world works, what's he then? An agitator?”
“Well. If you're asking what he'd be, there are plenty of names for it, but he wouldn't be an agitator, at least.”
“Why do you think so?”
At Haral's question, Riyan turned his gaze to the gladiators sweating on the training grounds.
Then he said quietly.
“Agitation only works among equals, doesn't it?”
“.......”
“There's no premise that they share the same environment, the same position, and the same experiences. To the ones listening, it would be no different from a passing dog barking.”
He knew this because he had experienced it far too often. To use an analogy, it was like the front lines and the rear.
No matter how desperately those in the field explained the situation, soaked in blood, the command in the rear judged human lives as mere numbers and issued heartless orders.
How many soldiers had bolted, saying insubordination or desertion would be better? And what fate had befallen them?
Like this, one's circumstances were also the benchmark that determined how cruel people could become, even though they were all human.
Meanwhile, Haral, unaware of what Riyan was thinking, grinned. Well, well, look at this one?
“You know your stuff. Good. Then I guess I can get straight to the point.”
“The point being?”
“You'll be fighting in a match before long.”
“Understood.”
Even at being told he'd fight in a match where his life was at stake, Riyan nodded without much reaction.
If anything, it was Haral who was surprised by that. However composed he acted, like an old man in a child's body, at his core he was clearly a green whelp, and yet his face was this calm.
“......Are you just simple, or do you have a lot of nerve?”
Berka had said something like that too.
Suddenly recalling their conversation in the prison, Riyan said calmly.
“Would anything change if I refused?”
“No, it wouldn't.”
“Then I have no choice but to accept it.”
“......Aren't you curious about anything? Like what your opponent is, what kind of match it is, how big the crowd will be, that sort of thing?”
Sensing that Haral somehow wanted him to ask, Riyan nodded.
“I'm curious.”
“Geez, it's like I had to bow first to get a bow out of you. Anyway, I don't know the exact details yet, but you won't need to worry much.”
“Why is that?”
“At first, you'll probably just warm up the crowd before the main matches. After you've built up some experience once or twice, you'll get to fight in the big ones too.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. So you don't need to feel any pressure for now. The guys who show up there are all about the same. Ones about to die, or ones already half dead. In other words, most of them are sent out just to fill the numbers because they don't show any promise worth raising properly. Of course, there's the opposite case too.”
“The opposite case?”
“It's also the match some schools send the gladiators they're serious about raising out to first. There's nothing better for building experience. If they can't win there, there's no reason to raise them in the first place, so it doesn't matter if they croak. Like you.”
Like you.
Hearing that, Riyan nodded. It meant the match was meant to test his potential.
Haral continued.
“Listen, kid. I'm not going to tell you to win for the school. I don't even expect it. You'd better think of it as fighting for yourself. Nothing's more precious than your life to begin with. Still, it'd be a problem if you put on too pathetic a show.”
“Because of the Director, I imagine.”
Haral had deliberately gone so far as to call him kid to remind himself that the one in front of him was a whelp, but the answer he got struck right at his blind spot.
“......Yeah. It's not just a matter of surviving. There has to be a show for the customers. And the Director's the one who judges that. Well, if you do well, there's nothing bad in it for you. He's clear-cut about rewards and punishments. On that front, at least, he's never false. It's just that he's a little short-tempered.”
Hearing Haral, Riyan narrowed his eyes.
A little short-tempered?
Well, he doubted the meaning of ‘a little’ that he knew had completely changed over all those long years.
Seeing Riyan let out a small, wry laugh, Haral seemed to relate and smiled back as he spoke.
“If you need anything, say so. I'll help you as best I can, within my power. Don't get the wrong idea—it's not kindness. I just need to know how you plan things so I can make my decision.”
“......Decision?”
At Riyan's question, Haral smiled slyly and whispered.
“On how much to bet on you.”