The one who was beaten remembers the one who did the beating.
The pain of that moment seeps in through the eyes and skin, claiming a prominent spot within the vast realm of memory.
To Rian Kade, Gerard was the man who had gifted him his first death and the one who had awakened his undying ability.
He could not forget him even if he tried.
On the other hand, the one who did the beating does not remember whom he beat. That is because he is too busy focusing on his own emotions and instilling violence and fear into his opponent.
Moreover, it was a battlefield.
When one was busy killing enemies rushing in from all sides, why would one commit the dead scum to memory?
To Gerard, Rian had merely been one of the many humans who had died by his blade.
'Still, it looked like he remembered me at the very end....'
Bewilderment had been evident in his eyes as he turned back.
Rian found that quite satisfying.
What kind of expression would Gerard make when they met again someday....
Finishing after briefly picturing that in his mind, Rian focused on the changes in his physical condition.
His consciousness should have been cut off for at least a day or more, yet this time his consciousness had remained intact with his hearing open.
And as the veil of darkness lifted, he had even been able to lock eyes with Gerard as the man left the battlefield.
Although the piercing of his heart had been shallower, it was an undeniable fact that it had been a certain death all the same.
'Is this a change from adaptation?'
It felt just like taking one's very first steps.
As if only the first time were hard, and from the second time onward the process grew progressively easier.
He had resolved not to rely on immortality, yet beneath that resolve lay a shallow awareness that he would not die even if killed.
Perhaps both his body and his mind had adapted to the premise that he was immortal.
Squelch—. Crunch—.
It felt as though countless threadworms were tangling and writhing inside his torn, slashed, and punctured wounds.
It was the process of his wounds healing.
And during that process, his lost sense of pain came back to life.
'Grrrgh!!!'
It was an agony starkly different from the process of recovering during excessive blood loss.
Rather than overlapping waves of pain, it was like pain exploding all in a single instant.
Perhaps the reason he had lost consciousness for a full day during his first death was because that explosive pain had seeped into him all at once?
Whatever the case.
Thump—. Thump—!
His heart began to pound fiercely.
And he felt it firsthand—as though the agony were inverting itself, the strength dwelling within his entire body was improving beyond what it had been before.
'Could this be called a talent, too?'
He could not deny that death brought about meaningful results.
When he felt death slowly seeping in, it granted temporary physical enhancement.
And after a certain death, the grueling experiences he had undergone right up until the moment of dying accumulated as though melting into his body, producing a permanent physical enhancement reaction.
Thus, he could only view it as an innate talent.
Then should he regard immortality as a blessing, rely on it, and use countless deaths to pursue physical enhancement?
If he did that, would he gain the talent to manifest Aura and rise to the position of a knight?
'No, I can't rely on it like that.'
He still did not know whether his immortality would last forever.
Nor did he know yet whether enhancing his body through death would allow him to manifest Aura.
Even if his immortality were eternal and enhancing his body through death enabled him to manifest Aura, he knew he could not become a true knight that way.
Knights were those who displayed superhuman abilities through their own convictions and willpower.
Were there any among them who had merely relied on their talent?
"The manifestation of Aura and the size of its vessel are things that cannot be achieved through talent alone. How should I put it... their conviction and willpower are extraordinary, you could say? That stood out in Azrion's Knight Commanders. Something unapproachable...."
Rian recalled the words of his father, Allen Kade, who had joined a knight order through swordsmanship talent alone and retired after losing his Aura because of Rian.
"Right. I can't rely on talent."
Not dying was certainly a talent. However, the process of dying and coming back to life had always been accompanied by his fierce struggle to survive.
That fierceness must have been what turned his deaths into meaningful ones of physical enhancement.
Therefore, the talent of not dying was merely one part of a relentless struggle for life.
He had to survive and endure by any means necessary, rising to knighthood not through talent, but through the sum of effort, conviction, and willpower.
CRACK—.
Strengthening his resolve, Rian snapped one of the spear shafts his body had pushed out during regeneration and gripped it in his hand.
Then he sliced across the wound sites that had healed clean, leaving only bloodstains behind.
Trickle—.
He deliberately inflicted wounds that were neither too deep nor too shallow.
Stab—.
Where he had suffered puncture wounds, he even stabbed himself, creating no small number of injuries.
'Kugh.... Sure enough, unless it's a fatal wound, injuries don't heal right away.'
He had not done that just to test the limits of his regenerative ability.
Clop—. Clop—!
Battalion Commander Monclay, having crossed Trevor Bridge, was riding this way at the head of his guard unit.
It was obvious he was galloping over to confirm with his own eyes the cause of the reversal in a hopeless situation.
Even so, should Rian report the whole truth of the situation to the Battalion Commander?
'I can't do that. He wouldn't believe me anyway, and even if he did, he'd obviously hand me over to an inquisitor to become the Church's test subject.'
No matter how much he had become a soldier as the adopted son of Allen, who had been granted the surname Kade, the stigma of being the sole survivor of the witch would never disappear.
Rustle—.
Rising to his feet just as he was, Rian stripped off the ruined upper piece of his Imperial Army armor and gave a military salute toward the approaching Monclay.
***
"Dear God!!"
Watching the Imperial Army collapsing as they crossed the ice sheet, Monclay cried out to God.
He welcomed the sudden reversal so much that he felt like stripping naked and dancing.
However, if he wanted to seize a proper chance at victory, he could not leave his army idle.
"Leave none of the scum who set foot on our territory alive!!"
They annihilated the hundreds of Imperial troops who had climbed onto dry land in high spirits, and—
"Pursue the fleeing imperial scum!! However, we do not know what other tricks those scum might have pulled!! All forces!! Advance!!"
"Waaaaah—!!!"
At Monclay's command, the soldiers charged ahead of one another toward Trevor Bridge.
Since the Imperial troops who had broken through the defensive line on the bridge had fled as soon as the ice sheet collapsed, the soldiers pushed through the corpses the Imperial Army had piled up like a wall and finished off the enemies who had remained to the end.
Clop—! Clop—!
Breaking through the main force crossing the wheat field, Monclay rode his horse toward where the mage had been.
'This has to be a miracle!!'
To freeze the Trevor River and create a sheet of ice, the mage must have been at least of the intermediate grade or higher.
Their defeat had been certain.
It would have been nice if the reversal he had prepared had arrived before their defeat, but he could not rely on news that never came.
He had even considered withdrawing his troops again and choosing to defend the castle instead, yet when the enemy had a mage capable of freezing a river, would defending a castle even have any meaning?
The fall of Northheim would only have been a matter of time, and with the supply line to their main force cut off as well, even the battle at the Twin Gorge would obviously have ended in defeat.
Therefore, holding out here until death—or waiting for word from those he had prepared for a worst-case scenario to arrive before then—had been the only reasonable course.
'To think we'd be met with a reversal like this!'
It was no different from the Goddess of Victory forcibly raising their hands when they were all but dead.
There was no way the mage hired by the enemy had created this miracle out of a sudden whim.
Since they had been able to observe from afar that a small commotion had broken out over there, it was unmistakably a reversal brought about by someone killing the mage.
'Whatever happened, there's no doubt they're the hero of this battle!'
Convinced in his own way that the mage had been killed by someone, Monclay spurred his horse hurriedly.
Upon reaching the scene, he witnessed someone tossing aside his armor and giving him a military salute.
'A soldier?!'
Black hair and dark eyes.
A physique forged through steady training.
And traces of battle etched across it.
Even now, the blood flowing from wounds all over his body seemed to speak of how desperate the fight had been.
To anyone's eyes, that bare-chested soldier was unmistakably the protagonist who had brought about the reversal.
Thud—.
Monclay dismounted from his horse and approached Rian.
The soldiers guarding him also hurriedly dismounted to escort him, yet—
Raise—.
Monclay raised a hand to hold back his guards and closed the distance to Rian.
"Did you kill the mage?!"
"Platoon Leader Rian Kade of the 1st Platoon, 3rd Company, reporting to Battalion Commander Monclay, sir."
Recognizing that Monclay already knew he was an ally from the blunt question, Rian stated his rank and name first.
At that, Monclay wore an expression of even greater disbelief.
"Impossible. You were surrounded on all sides, so how...?"
I died, and then I came back to life.
In a situation where he obviously could not report it like that, one of the guards frowned and spoke up.
"Don't tell me... you played dead while your comrades were dying all around you?!"
In truth, letting them misunderstand it that way was the most plausible cover for how he had survived until now.
Rian remained silent.
If they were going to hold him guilty for surviving a battlefield where he should have died, he thought he would gladly accept that too.
If only that could console his comrades for their dog's deaths.
"Did you say Rian Kade? Hmm....... The adopted son of Sir Allen?"
However, instead of holding him guilty, Monclay asked after his background. His expression looked as though he were calculating whether the person to be hailed as a hero possessed the rank and bloodline to match.
Rian answered Monclay's question as though he did not care what intention lay behind it.
"Yes, sir. That is correct."
"Huh.... Well, now. I heard you survived that infamous witch, too—did that luck work on this battlefield as well?"
Thoroughly concealing his own thoughts, Monclay stroked his chin and organized his mind.
Rian did not reply to the words Monclay had murmured as if to himself.
Monclay continued his questioning.
"You still haven't answered my question of whether you killed the mage?"
That question sounded very much like a demand for a detailed answer as to how he had pulled it off.
"After miraculously surviving the battle on the plains, I disguised myself in Imperial Army armor, approached the mage when the battle was at its height, and took his head."
Checking the corpses of the Shadow Unit members strewn around them, Monclay spoke.
"His guards must have been formidable fighters, though?"
Rian answered calmly.
"As you can see, sir."
He spread both arms to show the wounds covering his body. By action rather than words, he demonstrated that because he had disguised himself in Imperial armor, he had easily infiltrated the enemy's main camp, broken through the encirclement, and killed the mage.
Yet Monclay still looked Rian up and down with suspicious eyes.
The only child to survive the witch's den.
Even though that had certainly been a miracle, he was an ominous child who brought misfortune to those around him as the price for death passing him by.
Because of that, Monclay thought that this time too, there was no telling what misfortune Rian might bring upon those around him as the price for death passing him by.
'Could it be that he was born under a curse that brings misfortune to everyone around him in exchange for not dying?'
Because the person standing before his eyes was Rian Kade, Monclay could not help thinking that way, and Rian added further explanation to escape Monclay's suspicion.
It was a report stating that the mage had been defenseless, that the elite troops had recognized him as a spy and tried to tie him in league with someone from their own unit, and that because they had suddenly started fighting amongst themselves and croaked, he had been able to get away with only wounds of this extent.
"Hmm......."
Listening to Rian's detailed report, Monclay stroked his chin.
'Should I believe that story?'
No, whether he believed it or not did not matter. What mattered was judging how to make use of that man for the greatest benefit.
Should he hail him as a hero and keep him by his side for propaganda?
Or would it be better to tie the bizarreness of his surviving the battle on the plains alone to the accursed incident of his birth, hand him over to an inquisitor, and get him out of his sight?
After turning the matter over in his mind for a brief moment, Monclay seemed to have reached a decision and opened his tightly shut mouth.