The standoff, threatening to shatter at any moment, ended when a weapon clattered to the ground.
I had dropped mine.
The lord's face twisted hideously at the sight.
He ground his teeth as though he might kill me on the spot.
"Considering the severity of your offense, tearing you apart where you stand would not be enough, but I know how to show mercy. I will give you a choice."
Before the lord had even finished speaking, the guards leveled their spears in unison.
Not perfectly coordinated, but not a rabble, either.
"Prostrate yourself and beg forgiveness."
Exactly the response I'd intended.
By shifting the lord's attention to my weapon, hadn't the matter of the helmet been completely forgotten?
"Very well."
I slowly sank to my knees.
Then slowly bowed my head.
Of course, I could have killed the lord and every last guard and rewritten the law of this place, but if one kneel could resolve things, wasn't it worth bending a knee?
This way, I didn't needlessly kill the lord of Brüs, and I didn't need to remove my helmet, either.
"I had no intention of defiance. I drew the weapon only to discard it."
The lord spat.
"......Filthy commoner."
That was the end of it.
As though he'd lost interest, he spurred his horse and rode past me.
'I really have gotten old.'
There was a time when I had held my head high.
A hundred years ago, a storm of blood would have swept through Brüs.
But I'd had my fill of the stench of blood.
Slaughter had become a tedious affair, and whatever could be resolved without bloodshed, I resolved peaceably.
The me of a hundred years ago had been a brash man of the modern world; the me of today had simply become an aging man of the Middle Ages.
***
I returned to the inn, finished my meal, and turned in for the night.
Tomorrow, I planned to look briefly for paying work, and if nothing turned up, move on to a new city.
It had been close to a century since I'd begun drifting without destination.
Seventy years, perhaps. After killing the last member of the Luxeon Cult, I'd started this purposeless life as a wandering knight as if in a trance.
No, perhaps that was the wrong way to put it.
Not once in all my wandering had I stopped doubting whether every last one of them was truly gone.
In the end, I was roaming to erase from the world a Luxeon faction that might not even exist anymore.
I probably wouldn't be able to stop until I'd turned over every last corner of the world.
At this point, hadn't the whole thing moved beyond the concept of revenge?
The supreme mission of eradicating the Luxeon Cult wore the shell of vengeance, but had it not already become the driving force of my life itself?
Thoughts chased the tails of thoughts, and I sank deeper into a mire of contradictions.
I opened my eyes. I couldn't remember when I'd fallen asleep.
The night was still deep, and only faint moonlight filled the small room.
No, that wasn't quite right.
If I listened closely, it wasn't just moonlight filling the room; there was also an out-of-place sound.
The sound that had woken me.
"......Damn it."
It was the sound a horse makes when it's dying.
I hurried to the inn's stable.
The night was dark, but finding the way was no trouble at all.
"Plibentorinus II!"
Beyond the door I'd thrown open, a collapsed horse came into view.
Blood gushed from Plibentorinus II's neck in thick, heaving surges.
It was not the kind of bleeding you could attempt to stanch.
Plibentorinus II let out a feeble, breath-choked cry.
"Damn it all."
Knowing it was useless, I pressed my hands against Plibentorinus II's neck anyway.
The horse's breathing had been fading for some time, and before long the last of its warmth slipped away.
The cause of the bleeding was, obviously, a long slash wound across the neck.
Judging by how ragged the cut was, whoever did it had no talent whatsoever with a blade.
"......."
I could picture the culprit sawing at Plibentorinus II's neck as if with a saw.
I wiped my neck beneath my helm with the back of my hand.
What came away on my hand wasn't sweat but blood.
"Rest easy."
I closed Plibentorinus II's eyes.
Whoever was bold enough to do this would not die cleanly.
I've said it time and again: I'm not the type to enjoy needless killing.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
But when I felt it was necessary, I didn't hesitate, either.
Violence was not the best option, of course, but in most cases, it served as the next-best answer.
I rose from the blood-soaked ground.
Beneath the overwhelming smell of blood that all but numbed my nose, there lingered a different scent that even the gore couldn't fully mask.
Alcohol. The smell of booze.
Specifically, the unmistakable tang of cheap beer.
If someone reeked of drink so badly that even horse blood couldn't cover it, there was only one place they'd be at this hour.
A tavern. More precisely, one of the two places that served cheap beer.
Since I'd just come out of one of them, the Red Lynx inn, the culprit would be at the remaining one.
"Guess I'll go see what he looks like."
***
A cold night wind brushed my body.
But there was still warmth in my blood-stained hands.
When the sun sets, the city sleeps, but some places glow bright even at night.
Taverns were such places.
'Blame Brüs for being small.'
Unfortunately for whoever killed my horse, there was exactly one tavern in Brüs, and that was the very place I now stood before.
[The Laughing Dwarf]
I pushed open the weathered wooden door.
The rusted hinges shrieked, but not a soul turned to look.
The inside of the tavern was a mess.
People surrendering themselves to the pull of drink, people who'd come because sleep wouldn't find them, and others in similar straits, carrying every kind of grievance against society, had gathered to squander their lives.
I slowly pushed past the patrons too drunk to control their own bodies and made my way to the back of the tavern.
The heat from the lanterns warding off the darkness seeped through my helm.
Those who caught sight of my blood-splattered figure sucked in sharp breaths and moved aside.
Amid the stench of stale booze and the rowdy atmosphere, I was an unmistakable outsider.
The smell of blood didn't belong in a tavern.
So I, too, headed toward where the smell of blood was coming from.
There, at the end, would be the ones who killed Plibentorinus II.
"Hey there."
They were slumped face-down on a table, snoring.
On one side, towers of empty beer mugs were stacked high.
It was hard to imagine why street thugs like these had killed my horse, but their clothes were spattered with unmistakable bloodstains.
"Oi, hey there."
No matter how much I called, they showed no sign of coming to.
In the end, the last shred of twenty-first-century morality left in me evaporated completely.
Now was the time for medieval methods.
I seized one of the two by the collar and hauled him upright.
"Ugh, uhhh......."
Then I drove my fist into his face.
———THWACK!
"GHRK!"
After two or three more hits, his unfocused eyes finally came into focus.
I grabbed both of them by their collars and dragged them out of the tavern.
"Wh-what the hell!"
Perhaps the cold air finished the job of sobering them up.
One clutched his face and stared at me.
Without a word, I kicked him in the gut.
Once I'd thrashed the other one, too, he came around before long.
I asked them as politely as I could manage.
"Who sent you?"
"H-huh?"
They say a beating is the best medicine for a mad dog.
Lucky for me, these two didn't look much different from dogs.
———THWACK!
"AGHK! I-it was the lord's orders!"
"......The lord?"
One of the men sprawled on the ground spoke.
"Y-yeah. We, uh, we're the lord's private soldiers. So, basically, he told us to, you know, rough you up a bit. The lord did."
So they didn't have the nerve to come at me directly. Instead, after deliberating over how to harass me, they'd gone after my property, Plibentorinus II.
These two were bad enough, but the lord was even worse.
Dispatching private soldiers in the dead of night to torment me, wasn't that the sort of thing only a common thug would do?
I'd thought it seemed too magnanimous of him to let it go that easily.
To think he'd resort to this kind of underhanded scheming.
I had shown him due respect, and what I'd gotten in return was this.
'So he brings this on himself.'
If I tolerated any more, I'd just be a pushover.
I steeled my resolve to storm the lord's estate.
"You, take me to the lord's manor."
"......Huh?"
I slugged the other one unconscious.
The remaining one swallowed hard at the sight.
"Need me to say it again?"
"N-no, no sir. Yes, I'll show you the way."
He staggered to his feet and began walking unsteadily.
Whether from the booze still in his system or from the beating I'd given him, I couldn't tell.
The lord's manor was the largest building in Brüs.
Supposedly it employed over fifty servants, and when you counted the night watch and resident guards together, the number exceeded twenty.
Three of them stood at the front gate.
I hurled the man I'd dragged along right at their feet.
"Ooph!"
The guards recognized his face, and the color drained from theirs.
They stood rigid, on edge at the midnight intruder.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"I need to have a word with the lord."
They leveled their spears, but I didn't stop walking.
"Halt! Come any closer and we'll run you through!"
I had no intention of stopping, of course.
Faced with my unwavering approach, it was the soldiers pointing spears who backed away.
"I-I warned you!"
The guard shouted that he'd thrust if I took one more step, and I took precisely one more step.
The soldier at the front drove his spear forward. I stood still. The spear punched through my solar plexus.
Blood dyed my clothes red.
They'd already been stained with the horse's blood, but the blood flowing from the spear wound in my chest was more vivid still.
The crimson spreading from the center bloomed in stark relief.
Still, I didn't stop.
Impaled on the shaft, I walked forward until I stood before the soldier.
"Grrrk, HIIIIK!"
I seized his throat and lifted him off the ground.
Hoisting an adult man with one hand was nothing.
"If you're going to kill a man, you should at least be prepared to die yourself."
I tightened my grip.
His neck snapped, and the soldier went limp.
"AAAAAAAHH!"
"A m-monster!"
The two remaining guards and the man from the tavern screamed and fled into the manor.
"......No weapon."
Having come straight from the tavern, I was completely unarmed.
The only piece of armor I had was the rusted helm I always wore.
After a moment's thought, I drew the sword hanging from the dead guard's hip. A passable longsword.
I crossed the garden and reached the manor's entrance.
The door was, predictably, bolted shut, but a couple of kicks sent the hinges flying off.
———THUD! BOOM!
Beyond the flung-open door, a cluster of soldiers stood tensed and ready.
They must have scraped together every man they could in that short time, for there were more than a dozen of them.
"......Foul monster! Do you not fear the gods?!"
To their eyes, a man walking around unharmed with a spear dangling from his solar plexus was nothing more and nothing less than a monster.
'Can't say they're wrong.'
That I had become something divorced from humanity was a realization I'd come to long ago.
And not merely in the physical sense.
"Is it because there's nothing else left to fear that you fear the gods?"
"Y-you monster...... You blaspheme even the gods!"
A soldier charged, and I brought the sword down like chopping wood.
The blade buried itself in his skull and he crumpled, but five more thrust their spears right after.
Spears pierced through various parts of my body.
I caught the shaft of the nearest attacker, pulled him toward me, and brought the sword crashing down on the stumbling soldier's head again and again.
Bright red blood sprayed.
A metallic stench hit so sharply my nose stung.
When one died, I killed the next.
My body was being torn to shreds in the process, but the days of fussing over such things were long past.
A fight of one against many.
Any infant could've predicted the outcome, but when that one refuses to fall no matter how grievously wounded, the story changes.
How is a soldier who cannot be killed any different from an infinite army?
So this was not one against many. It was infinity against many.
In the end, the only one left standing on two feet was me.
Shredded fragments of flesh and a lake of blood filled the spacious manor.
Roughly half of it was mine.
I waited until my body had fully mended itself, then slowly made my way toward the staircase.
With every step, a wet squelch echoed.
Footprints redder than the red carpet pressed one after another into the floor, trailing all the way to the lord's chamber.
My head swam. On days when I bled, forgotten memories surfaced. I had lived a very long time, and the memories gradually pressing down on my consciousness were vast in proportion.
Who am I? I was a citizen of the twenty-first century, Eladin's sole follower, and the wandering knight Roan Belgard.
That was enough.
I opened the door to the room where the lord of Brüs awaited.