"Haaah—!!"
I'm going to die at this rate.
Thomson felt as though his lungs would tear open.
He wanted to lie down and rest for a moment, but each time he did, Commander Jack sent a heavy stare his way, and he found himself springing back up and running again.
"Hey, Thomson. Are you going to lie there so idly? You can do more!"
Perhaps because his body was so exhausted, Thomson began hearing things in his ears.
Since meeting Jack, Thomson's life had changed enormously.
He'd been so busy he hadn't wasted so much as a single second.
'Why am I going this far?'
Back when he lived with the Family, he'd done slapdash work, lazed around, and gone looking for work again only when the money ran out.
Don't they say idleness is poison?
As his body wore down, the idleness of those days began creeping its head back up.
'I'd honestly be fine if he just had me clean or look after the horses.......'
As his resolve weakened, he heard the phantom voice again.
"Enough! Thomson, throw away your thoughts and move your body. Build up strength and weakness dies."
He didn't want to live like a mayfly, without a single dream or hope.
Thomson steeled his resolve.
'I'm going to change.'
The others in the Family had praised a life of easy pickings day after day, but Thomson had always felt uneasy about it even so.
So this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
'Commander Jack really is an incredible person.'
He was the most extraordinary man Thomson had seen in his entire life.
And a person like that had said he would teach him the sword.
'He said he'd make me...... one of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent.'
One of the ten strongest knights on the continent.
It sounded absurd, but everything he had seen of Jack made those words feel real.
'Me, one of the Ten Great Knights?'
He'd become the hero of the songs the bards used to sing?
There was no way he could sit still at that.
Thomson's heart caught fire.
Because for the first time he had something that could be called a dream.
'I can do it!'
Commander Jack had never once told a lie.
That was why he believed him.
From what he had heard, even that regression business was real.
'They talked exactly like people who really came from the future.'
There were two people from the future.
One was the Mercenary King.
The other was a noble.
A Margrave, no less.
'Both of them are terrifying, though.......'
The Jack that Thomson had seen was the owner of a dreadful monstrous strength.
Somehow it felt as though following Jack around had shown him nothing but grim sights, and yet strangely he kept thinking that Commander Jack was a man of character.
'A person with his own clear standards.'
Suddenly, something came back to him.
The words the old holy knight who'd thrown away the monster carcasses had muttered to himself.
"It is said that a man with a center does not waver, and so I have left behind that guideline."
Had that not been said with Commander Jack in mind?
He wished that he too might one day become like that.
Thomson ran, collapsed, and ran again, all the while thinking about the 'Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company.'
And then, around daybreak.
"Hey, the Margrave's gone?"
"What on earth is Lady Mel thinking, leaving that bastard alone......."
"She's the Margrave now."
The knights running beside him grew talkative.
Thomson looked up toward the training grounds and saw Commander Jack standing alone.
Was that a problem of some kind?
"Whew—. Sixteen, they say?"
It was true that Commander Jack was sixteen years old.
But the mental age of the Jack that Thomson knew was forty, and the martial power he possessed transcended age and years entirely.
And the knights were muttering ominously about that very Jack.
"I know the previous Margrave acknowledged him and Lady Mel, no, the Margrave, treasures him, but isn't this too much?"
"So what, are you going to mutiny?"
Called out in the dead of night and made to run parade-ground laps all day for no reason.
And in full armor at that, made to run while hauling spare armor from the quartermaster's stores.
"Fuck. At thirty-five years old, am I supposed to take orders from a sixteen-year-old knight commander?"
"Hey, didn't you hear what the senior knights said? They said that man's an absurdly skilled fighter......."
Barun, the younger brother of the current Margrave, Mel.
The rumor that every knight who had followed him had been butchered by Jack had spread through the castle.
Barun's head, mounted on the castle gate, proved it.
News barely a day old, still steaming.
"Bullshit. The bastards who followed Young Master Barun were all mercenary types who'd eaten blade-rations, and the seniors who always resented them are exaggerating."
"With a build like that, wouldn't it be possible?"
Two meters twenty in height, and a body of solid muscle.
"He's still just a man. Even the previous commander struggled against four Aura Users of the same rank, so does it make any sense that a sixteen-year-old took on dozens?"
"Well, that's true. But is there any justification?"
"What are we in the first place? Aren't we knights?"
And knights invested by a noble, at that.
'Chivalry'-revering men could hardly obey such an unreasonable order, the argument went on.
'All this breaks out the moment the Margrave leaves?'
Thomson, listening quietly, thought this was genuinely strange.
The moment Margrave Mel left, the knights' grievances came pouring out.
'Surely the Commander up there is hearing this entire conversation.......'
No matter how he thought about it, wasn't Commander Jack standing over there more frightening than Mel, who was the Margrave?
So why did they mind themselves in front of the Margrave and behave like this the moment only the Commander was left?
Just as Thomson's bewilderment reached its peak.
"You've got a lot of complaints. Stop squeaking like rats and come forward and say it."
Commander Jack said.
The words were delivered in a low tone, yet it felt as though something heavy had settled over the training grounds.
But it seemed that was only true for Thomson.
"New commander, sir, grievances, you said? Grievances, I've got fucking plenty."
"I don't know how you caught the Margrave's eye and became commander, but is this an order befitting someone who knows a knight's honor?"
A knight order that fights monsters.
That was what Margrave Kranel's knights were.
Which was to say they were all rough by nature.
And yet the roughest man in this place was Jack.
Jack stepped forward without any explanation whatsoever.
"Any bastards with grievances, step forward."
Commander Jack ripped one of the parade ground's pillars right out—CRACK.
Then he pressed the wooden pillar with his palms, kneading it into the shape of a long club.
Every knight was thrown off seeing Jack come out holding a club as though he had been waiting for this, and in that opening Jack posed a question.
"Are knights with swords at their belts afraid of me alone?"
***
WHACK! WHACK! CRACK!
"Next."
After subduing the knights who defied me with the club, I made them assume the prone position and beat them like dogs.
It was an educational method from the incomprehensible world, one I'd learned from my companions.
'Quite useful.'
Of course, I didn't beat just anyone.
Some bastards had actually drawn their swords on me, and I was singling out only those for special treatment.
"The word of the knight commander is absolute."
I said it after the thrashing.
At that, a thousand knights straightened their bodies and repeated it back.
The word of the knight commander is absolute!!!
A thunderous roar ringing across the vast parade ground.
After the call and response, it was the next one's turn to get beaten.
"Down."
A knight, swollen and pulpy, staggered and lay prone on the training ground floor.
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!!!
"I'm the knight commander appointed by the Margrave. Ignoring my word is no different from treason, an attempt to override the authority of the Margrave who appointed me."
This was how I commanded another man's army.
1. Receive full authority from the army's owner. (Talk it over with Mel and they generally end up cooperating.)
2. Summon the army and set them to tiresome, irritating tasks. (This time it was parade-ground laps, but on a battlefield I make them clear corpses.)
3. Then they rise up among themselves and turn against me. (Usually they foam at the mouth about how it could possibly be acceptable to make men who are knights handle corpses.)
4. At that point, invoke the honor of the owner who granted me command authority and deliver a proper education.
The bastards it doesn't work on, I simply give up on.
I either let them get used up as numbers or abandon that battlefield entirely.
Fortunately, it worked well here.
While continuing the thrashing and reminiscing, I sensed a presence far off.
A very small voice reached me.
"Boss, the kids are dying."
It was Mel.
She knew my hearing, so she spoke in a whisper from far off.
Since we intended to make use of this domain for the time being, Mel and I had divided the roles between us.
When I tactfully stopped the beating, Mel approached and spoke.
"Our knight commander said he wished to see the knights' skills, but his hand was a little heavy. All of you may take rest."
I was the whip, and Mel was the carrot.
"All of you, rest! The personnel I name will assemble here in four hours."
I picked out one hundred men who had looked unusually strong during the parade-ground laps and gave them their orders.
These were the ones who'd come with me to take over the Arcane Ore mine.
Once everything was finished, I asked Mel.
"So did you find a way?"
Having Mel step away hadn't been solely for the sake of disciplining the knights.
I had given Mel a separate task.
Finding a means to contact our two remaining comrades.
"Magical communication hasn't spread yet, so getting in touch directly is difficult. Veil and Yuria must have come back too, though......."
"What's it called, isn't there that big orb in the royal castle?"
"Ah! The crystal sphere?"
The royal castle's crystal sphere was an absurdly enormous and inefficient object used to exchange communications between nations.
In practice, it had exactly one use.
Namely, the 'declaration of war.'
"Could we use that?"
"It just scatters a mind-voice across every neighboring country, you know?"
"If it comes to that, we'll have to use even that."
I supposed a message like <It's Jack. Veil, Yuria, if you've come back, assemble at xx at once!> would spread across the Kingdom of Alton's neighbors.
Still, if we were desperate, what else could we do but use it?
"So can you use it?"
"Hmm, once we finish the whole plan and turn the kingdom into a puppet state it'd be doable, but that takes a long time. If you want to use it right away we'd have to occupy the royal castle, so I'm against it!"
"Occupying the royal castle......."
"Boss, don't take that seriously! And even if we use it, the Empire's far enough that they might not hear it."
Veil was in the Empire, and Yuria at a mage tower near the Empire.
I didn't remember, but Mel remembered it well.
"Ah, this is really awkward......."
Mel muttered in a troubled tone.
Exchanging messages through a merchant company was out too; the Kranel Margraviate had no merchant company dealing with foreign countries to speak of.
The kingdom itself was isolated, so even finding a merchant company that traded with other countries was apparently extremely difficult.
But Mel, as always, would find an answer.
And so she did.
"Boss, Baron Panier said he'd give us an Arcane Ore mine, right?"
Setting the kingdom right required money.
And an Arcane Ore mine meant money.
A great deal of it, at that.
Mel seemed to have found something on that end.
"What's at the mine?"
"I think I'd have to go see the scale of the mine to know, but my guess is that domain has something they're siphoning off on the side."
"So there's a merchant company transporting and selling goods abroad."
"Exactly."
As expected, that was my monstrous strength for you.
The butterfly effect of my first battlefield had grown this big.
"If I hadn't gone to that first battlefield, we'd have been in real trouble."
"Right? I wanted to finish off the money problem as much as possible before a summons flies in from the palace, and it'd be great if the contact issue got solved along the way!"
The previous Margrave had already sent a herald to the palace, so Mel's formal investiture would begin within a few days.
Until then, we were free to move about as we pleased.
***
"You may have gotten younger, Boss, but you don't look like much has changed."
"You've changed a lot."
Mel muttered, running a hand over her own face.
"Really? I thought I took care of myself pretty well......."
"Your tattoo's gone and you've got two eyeballs now, don't you?"
"What! That's what you meant?"
Listening to Mel's peals of laughter, we advanced leisurely toward Baron What's-His-Name's barony.
The knights following me, and of course Thomson, who kept falling off his horse, all stared at us with startled eyes.
"Everyone face forward."
It was only natural for such a sight to feel odd on a journey toward a battlefield.
But it was also a deeply familiar sight to my Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company.
'Bending the world to my own standard is the true path of the strong.'
In my past life, I'd ridden into battle standing atop the head of an old dragon known as an Ancient Dragon.
Even then, Mel held fast to the seat beside me. (Of course, once the fighting intensified, Mel would use the power of Mystery to flee to the rear on her own.)
There was even a time when I stood on the same battlefield as the Emperor who'd once betrayed me, and Mel and I traded jokes in front of the Emperor to kill time.
In any case, much as back then, Mel was seated behind me on my white horse.
"It really is unusual for a famed northern horse to end up in a minor kingdom like this."
A horse two meters at the withers.
Horsepower capable of bearing thirty percent of my monstrous strength.
"Boss, you said the first battlefield was designed to be a defeat from the start, right?"
Though we were merely riding along, Mel deduced a great deal about Baron What's-His-Name's house.
"Maybe this white horse and that mithril armor were gifts Baron Panier gave to Baron Hatia?"
"If that's true, then Baron What's-His-Name must be a crazy bastard."
Two Barons What's-His-Name had fought a territorial war.
And did it make any sense for the territory meant to lose to gift a famed horse and armor to a knight of the territory meant to win?
On top of that, in my past life, he'd offered up even his own subjects' lives for a knight's war merit.
"It roughly makes sense if you tie in the merchant company. You may not know it, Boss, but in this kingdom the south is the one region positioned to run trade caravans to other countries."
Mel guessed that Baron What's-His-Name's house, which held the Arcane Ore mine, had received something like rights to a merchant company in exchange.
"And if losing the war was the contract in return......."
She added one more remark.
"That territory might be getting invaded right now, you know?"
It was a shocking statement, that my Arcane Ore mine was in danger of being seized by an enemy.
I didn't understand the chain of cause and effect at all, but the assets of my Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company being taken was something that must never happen.
"All of you, move quickly."
I slapped the white horse's flank and surged forward.
Truly, this horse's horsepower was something else.
I felt the presences of the knights behind me fall rapidly away.
The destination was set anyway, so they only had to gather there.
"Boss, faster! Our mine is in danger!"
An Arcane Ore mine was like a heaven-sent treasure trove of tremendous value.
Once the World War broke out, the value of Arcane Ore would soar exponentially, and it could fetch an enormous price from any power in the world.
So I raised our speed while pouring my monstrous strength into the horse.
Snorting and shuddering—.
As a side effect the horse suffered intermittent convulsions, but in the end we were able to arrive far sooner than expected.
And then.......
"My mine—."
I ended up witnessing my mine surrounded by enemies.