"So you're saying there's something the previous Margrave hid beyond this wall?"
"That's right. I already tore the defensive magic apart, so push the wall and a door will open."
Mel had become the house head.
Which is to say she had come to own everything belonging to the Kranel margrave's house.
So she had been going through this and that with the Boss, looking over what was worth taking.
Then Jack suddenly started harping on about a 'hunch' and smashed the floor open on sheer impulse, and inside they found an unusual passage.
Following the passage on foot, they came upon this wall.
'Monstrous intuition.'
The Boss was a monster no matter when you looked at him.
That Spirituality of his in particular was something she still didn't understand, even now that she'd regressed.
If there was anyone who had researched the Boss's Spirituality the most, it would be Yuria, the Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company's Mage Corps Commander.
Mel recalled Yuria's words.
"Monstrous strength is a kind of universal substance. No, should I call it universal energy?"
Uncovering the true nature of the Boss's Spirituality and monstrous strength was Yuria's goal.
'Yuria's word is worth trusting.'
If the Boss's original Spirituality were counted as one hundred, the regressed Boss's Spirituality was supposedly only one.
And yet he'd spent that one to restore her dying father to a perfectly sound state for an entire day.
Mel, who had been with Jack in his younger days, back when he had no Spirituality at all, realized that the Boss's power was far stronger than she had thought.
Actually, that wasn't the immediate problem.
"Good grief, this is absurd."
Mel was dumbfounded.
Having discovered this room, she could hardly be otherwise.
"I have never for a moment regarded you as my daughter....... but since you have secured honor for my death, I too ought to do my proper duty."
The previous house head, who had behaved as though he had transcended everything, had passed it all on to Mel and departed.
He told her everything, from the secret passages of the Margrave's castle to information about the wealth he had accumulated over the years.
She had wondered whether he had come to his senses before dying, but that had been Mel's misapprehension.
"Seriously, a man with one day left to live acted like this toward me right up to the end?"
"That piece-of-shit bastard goes out being petty to the last. All he has is a few coins and some scraps of paper."
CRASH—!!
Jack smashed the wall.
And a secret space appeared within it.
"Insane."
Pouches filled with gold coins and a desk strewn with documents came into view.
It wasn't those that had startled Mel.
'The Boss can already detect what's beyond a wall?'
Coming here had been Jack's intuition, but finding something beyond the wall was unmistakably detection using Spirituality.
He'd said he had one point of Spirituality.......
"Wait, how have you recovered already?"
According to the Boss, Spirituality was power.
Just as strength needed time to recover after use, so did Spirituality.
"Since it's only one point of Spirituality, it recovers faster than expected."
"Boss, you could do clairvoyance and detection with that one point?"
"This has been possible since right after the regression. It's less that I used Spirituality and more that it's an extension of monstrous strength."
"That'll make things a lot easier if push comes to shove!"
Mel laughed brightly.
The sensing ability the Boss himself insisted on calling 'monstrous strength' was superior to the detection magic of most archmages.
It had the insane capability to grasp not only the surrounding space and what lay beyond walls, but whether a person hiding inside a mana barrier had poison concealed in his clothes.
"To think we can use the Boss's detection already......."
"Detection is a kind of power too. That's why it resonates with my monstrous strength and gets this kind of efficiency."
'Power' in a word was all it took for Jack to attach monstrous strength to it; that was his habit.
To Jack, eyesight was the eyes' monstrous strength, hearing was the ears' monstrous strength, and buoyancy was the monstrous strength possessed by water.
To Jack, who had solved everything with force, 'monstrous strength' was something proven.
If things went sideways here, he might well launch into a lecture on 'monstrous strength.'
Mel smiled mischievously and changed the subject.
"So you used Spirituality when you first found me too, didn't you?"
"Ahem."
At that, Jack turned his head away.
"You saw everything?"
"There was no other way if I was going to save you."
"Boss, you pervert."
After a bit of idle chatter, the two of them examined the secret room the previous Margrave had hidden to the very end.
Jack gathered up the gold coins while Mel rifled through the documents on the desk.
Maps and papers concerning the Kingdom of Alton.
Among them she spotted a sheet of unusually antique texture.
'A letter?'
[To His Highness the Second Prince.]
[As I mentioned at the banquet some time ago, I propose a marriage contract between our house's eldest daughter, Mel Kranel, and His Highness the Second Prince. His Highness would gain, through marital ties, the backing of our house, the overlord of the south. In the coming struggle for the throne......]
It appeared to be a letter prepared before Mel's father collapsed.
'He was going to marry me off to that degenerate Second Prince?'
Mel's brows drew together.
It meant she was thoroughly furious.
"Mel, what sort of letter is that, for you to stare at it so hard?"
Jack, noticing, asked.
"I just found out why he kept this place a secret."
Mel read out the contents of the letter in brief.
"If I'd seen this letter beforehand, that Margrave bastard would've been mounted on the castle gate instead of buried in the family mausoleum. Father and son, heads mounted side by side, would've been fun—."
Jack recalled the head of Mel's younger brother mounted before the castle gate and laughed heartily.
Then he laid a hand on the map.
Tap—.
"So the forces are split into three?"
Jack read the kingdom's rough configuration from the figures set on the map.
'Whew, thank goodness he remembers it all.'
Mel and the others had failed to teach Jack to read.
Still, using the excuse that it was necessary for war, they had crammed into him as much as they could about reading maps and reading the balance of power.
Since this was something the Boss had to see for himself, Jack had learned it readily and without objection.
"Mel, if it's as you say and he meant to marry you into the royal house—. Then the Second Prince must be the bastard who rode the military faction's backing and inflamed the civil war."
"Yep. I was going to explain, and you just went and figured it out."
"It's obvious enough."
Mel let out a small laugh.
Because she recalled her past life, when she first met the Boss.
"War ends when you kill all the enemies."
Jack in his younger days, charging recklessly forward, declaring he would kill and be killed until the enemy was gone.
'When I first met him, the Boss couldn't read a map and didn't care at all about the shape of the factions.'
The Boss now was younger than he'd been then.
But his head held the seasoned experience of forty years.
Honestly, Mel felt more reassured by the fact that Jack's experience had remained intact than by the existence of his Spirituality.
***
If I'd come back alone, things might've been considerably troublesome.
But I had my strategist, Mel.
"The Kingdom of Alton falls a year and a half from now."
"Rounded off, that comes out the same as the two years I remembered."
Unlike me, who remembered it only approximately, Mel remembered the exact point in time.
"And you meet me two and a half years from now."
"So that's why the timeline felt strange to me?"
By the time I met Mel, the Kingdom of Alton had already fallen.
That timeline had felt odd to me, but it was simply that I had misremembered.
"A year and a half is time enough."
"More than enough."
We had obtained a margrave's house, and along with it the right to command the army attached to it.
For two regressors to start out already holding a power base was a genuinely enormous thing.
"So if we can just handle the civil war, this country can function properly?"
"At the very least we'll avoid the sight of the entire kingdom being wiped out by a nuclear bomb."
The Kingdom of Alton would be annihilated in its entirety by the dwarves' experimental nuclear bomb.
A fair number of reasonably strong knights and mages would survive, but they'd be seized by the necromancers who occupied the region and reduced to high-grade undead.
"We'll have to normalize the kingdom while preserving as much magical strength as possible."
If we were going to do it, we had to do it properly.
So that as little innocent blood as possible would be spilled.
"Whatever becomes of the nobles, I don't want to see guys like Thomson all die."
Thomson was a pretty capable guy.
"Right? He even cleaned this well?"
"I only just learned that myself."
The more I looked at him, the more he turned out to be capable of.
The room that had been used by the thing that was Mel's father was now mine.
That room had certainly been drenched in blood, yet I stepped out briefly and came back to find it immaculately refurbished.
"To think he blocked even the maids from entering and cleaned all this by himself. Thomson, a noble's power lies in making his servants do the work."
"B-but....... I thought the two of you might have left something secret in here—."
Thorough about security, on top of everything else.
A most satisfying answer.
"Very well done."
"Th-thank you!"
The greenhorn Thomson bowed his head deeply.
I had told him he could run away at any time, but he showed no sign of intending to.
No, at this point I had no intention of letting him go.
"Wow, damn. That guy keeps hitting on the Boss."
I'm not into men.
Even so, I couldn't deny that Thomson was winning me over.
"He even looked after Father's coffin. Really......."
Clean new bedding had been laid over the most luxurious bed, the one that had belonged to the Margrave.
And atop that bedding rested the golden coffin in which my father lay.
It was a level of delicacy rarely seen even among the members of my mercenary company.
'I'll have to take him along and raise him properly.'
No matter how I thought about it, a guy that meticulous shouldn't be left in the rear.
Cook, mount handler.
Positions like that didn't suit Thomson.
I nodded calmly and looked at Mel.
"Two years."
"Hm?"
"By then, I'll make him one of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent."
Mel's eyes went round.
"You're going to raise him yourself?"
"Yes."
"Swordsmanship too?"
"Yes."
"Wow, damn....... That's insane."
Mel let out a sound of admiration.
I was called Rip-Anything Jack, but in truth what I'm best at is swordsmanship.
From the age of four I received the teachings of my father, a master of supreme swordsmanship, and I'm skilled enough with a blade that I'd been founding my own 'Monstrous Strength Swordsmanship.'
'I never finished it, for lack of time—.'
Now that I'd returned to the past, I had more than enough time.
In this life, I'd prove on this continent that the Monstrous Strength Swordsmanship of Jack the Mercenary King stood above all.
"S-swordsmanship? I'm going to learn it?"
But why was it, I wonder?
Even though I was offering to teach him the sword personally, the greenhorn Thomson didn't look particularly pleased.
Come to think of it, Thomson didn't know yet how great I was.
'It'd look ridiculous for me to explain it myself.'
I don't like going out of my way to say with my own mouth how great I am.
If I just show them, they'll be convinced.
I've never seen a decent one among those who run their mouths.
Which is to say.
"Follow me out. I'll use this chance to whip this domain's knight bastards into shape and lay your foundations, Thomson."
***
As the new knight commander, I was granted the authority to command the territorial army.
In front of the training grounds, I asked Mel.
"Mel, should this domain's army be regarded as numbers?"
Treating them as numbers meant it didn't matter how many were used up.
We were about to start setting the kingdom right, so naturally it was something I needed to know.
"No. Treat them as a friendly army."
A friendly army, then.
"I see. I'll have to tighten up their discipline."
To become friendly, they'd need time to be convinced.
By the nature of mercenary work, I had many occasions to operate alongside other armies.
So I studied an easy, convenient method for perfectly commanding another man's army, and found the finest approach of all.
"In the name of the knight commander, I summon every knight of this domain."
It was the dead of night.
Roused by a call at an ungodly hour, knights came running from their beds and filled the training grounds.
For a mere minor kingdom's margrave, he sure had a lot of knights.
'A little over a thousand.'
Quality aside, there were a lot of them.
Counting ordinary soldiers, they could easily fill out ten thousand.
"Starting now, the stamina test begins. All of you, run!"
What I was about to do was the infinite parade-ground laps.
They were said to be knights who'd fought monsters on the front lines, and they did take orders well.
Every one of them immediately began running the parade ground.
"Haaah—. Hah!"
Among the knights I could see Thomson, gasping for breath and trailing behind.
The other knights breathed easily, but their faces had soured.
Had the laps gotten them all worked up?
I intended to keep grinding the knights like this until daybreak, while discussing the future with Mel.
"Boss, there's a reason the previous house head wanted to sell me off to join the Second Prince's faction."
Mel said.
"This domain's flat broke."
Margrave Kranel was a pauper.
"Why?"
"It's a domain that hunts monsters, and the monsters are gone, right?"
The southern wall that held back the monsters.
That was why they were called margraves.
Monsters, killed and sold, brought in a surprising amount of money.
That was this domain's main source of income, and the residents' jobs were apparently specialized in monster dismantling and processing.
"So there's no tax revenue."
"Right, and on top of that they bought a mountain of pointless arms and armor to prepare for the civil war, so they're genuinely poor. Looks like bankruptcy in a couple of months?"
Indeed.
The thing that was Mel's father.
And the thing that was her younger brother.
All of them had thrown those goddamn fits in their own way because they were trying to do something about it.
"The Kranel domain's specialty is monster materials. Its strength is a hardy army. Look at them, they're not even tiring."
Several hours had already passed, and the knights were still fresh.
Only Thomson had dropped out.
"That's why they want the civil war."
I understood the rough shape of the situation.
A domain whose only asset was force had now lost its money too, so the flow led to nothing being left but war.
"Run in armor. Execute!"
After grinding the knights harder still, I looked at Mel again.
"Mel, praise me."
There was still one thing Mel didn't know.
"Thanks to my having gone through my first battlefield, I obtained this."
I handed Mel the letter of recommendation Baron What's-His-Name had given me.
"What is this......."
Mel's eyes went round with surprise.
Seeing her make such an expression with two intact eyeballs was rather startling.
Who could have imagined that going through my first battlefield would come back to me as such a benefit?
Good results follow any kind of force.
"He says he'll offer up an Arcane Ore mine. Shouldn't we go and collect it?"