"......Wait, that crazy bastard the Stalwart Knight is here?"
After sending away the people around us, Mel asked with her eyes wide open.
Lowest-ranked or not, the fact that one of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent was in an obscure petty kingdom like this seemed to shock her considerably.
"Why is he here?"
"That's what I'd like to know."
I didn't know why that bastard was here either.
As I shrugged, Mel tilted her head and spoke.
"The board's gotten bigger than I expected, hasn't it?"
"The board got bigger?"
"It means even that bastard's master is tangled up in the fall of the Kingdom of Alton."
It was a reasonable point.
As a rule, renowned knights are loyal to their masters.
The more famous a knight becomes, the deeper his fidelity to his master grows.
As I nodded—.
"Boss, lowest-ranked or not, isn't he a bit much for you to take on right now?"
A provocative question came out of nowhere.
To call the mere lowest seat of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent too much for me.......
Wasn't that downright impertinent?
"How dare—."
I wanted to say something, but the subtle look in Mel's eyes gave me pause.
At times like this, it's best to think twice.
'Hm.'
On careful reflection, she wasn't wrong.
My body now wasn't what it had been in my days as Mercenary King.
I calmly acknowledged what deserved acknowledgment.
"In terms of raw physical performance alone, I suppose so."
I'd called him a piece-of-shit bastard, but a man on the level of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent would surpass me in sheer physical performance, weakened as I was from regressing.
That couldn't be helped, since the ten strongest knight bastards on the continent were bundled together and called the Ten Great Knights.
"......T-Ten Great Knights!!!"
In the middle of that conversation, Thomson, who had been listening beside us, couldn't hold back a groan.
For reference, Thomson was able to remain here because he was a member of my mercenary company.
In truth, his reactions were rather endearing, so both Mel and I kept him around on purpose.
"They're nothing much. Still, they're the ones you should set as your goal, Thomson."
"Me, among the ten strongest knights on the continent......."
"Put that way they sound strong, but in the end knights are nothing more than puppets that move at their lord's command."
An excellent knight is much the same as a perfect doll.
The true knights I had seen never doubted their lord's orders and carried them out without regard for means or method.
But I reject such knights; if anything, I loathe them.
"You must grow as strong as the Ten Great Knights, but you must never become like them."
I didn't intend merely to raise Thomson's martial force.
Along with martial force, I intended to cultivate the strength of heart a man ought to hold.
A great cause.
My father said that a man ought, as a matter of course, to hold a great ambition in his breast.
It would be difficult for that young whelp to hold a great cause just yet, but as he wandered the battlefields with me, Thomson would naturally come to set a will of his own.
On a battlefield, that absurd environment, there are always plenty who get swept away by unreasonable violence—.
"Without a center to hold you, you become nothing but a wraith drunk on slaughter, drifting across battlefields."
The 'Bloody Retribution Mercenary Company,' which I'd once belonged to and later destroyed, was the prime example.
"If you follow me and help settle this country's civil war, Thomson, you'll naturally come face to face with such men."
As expected, it seemed hard for him to grasp; Thomson only blinked.
I remembered showing much the same reaction as Thomson when my father taught me the same thing.
And so, just as it had been for me, I brought out words a young whelp of that age would find easy to understand.
"In the world of true powerhouses, men are called by their own unique epithets rather than by a label that bundles several together."
Ranking, in other words.
The fact that there is something above the Ten Great Knights of the Continent.
As a child, when my father went on about great causes and such, I would nod off, blinking.
On the other hand, I remember being shocked out of my wits the first time I heard about the bastards stronger than the Ten Great Knights.
Thomson's reaction was similar.
"There are people stronger than the Ten Great Knights?"
"The real ones are called by different names."
I added a brief explanation with examples.
The current emperor of the distant Empire, the Conquering Blood Emperor; the Guardian of the World Tree of the Elven Kingdom; the Wandering Knight of Slaughter, and so on.
"A powerhouse who holds a will of his own is called by a name of his own. A knight is nothing but someone else's sword."
"T-Then, Commander Jack, you are......."
"The people who held the Boss in awe called him the Mercenary King!"
When Thomson gave his endearing reaction, Mel grinned and cut into the conversation.
So I wasn't the only one who found him fun to teach.
"T-The king of mercenaries!!!"
The title of king is not attached to just anyone.
And it was even less the sort of word that would attach to a mercenary drifting across the continent.
And the name Mercenary King had been attached to me with an even more particular meaning.
"The name Mercenary King doesn't mean king of mercenaries. Boss called himself a mercenary, so the common people just started calling him that on their own."
The name of king is carved by the recognition and belief of the many.
My mobile fortress carried a kind of symbolism for the common people.
It was like a law that held absolutely, regardless of nationality or race.
When the moving fortress of the Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company appears, the war in that region ends.
Before I regressed, it had been an age of war.
More enemies, more deaths.
It was a time when every faction and nation waged continent-scale wars like madmen, all to widen their holdings by a handful of territory.
In such a world, kings and nobles cared nothing for the homes of the common folk.
"The Boss was different."
As Mel said, I suppressed the deaths of ordinary people as much as I could.
That was why my Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company became a legend among the common folk.
It was a fairly embarrassing story for me.
"Thomson, do you know what the Mercenary King ended up symbolizing?"
"V-Victory?"
"No. The people who called the Boss a king saw us as a symbol of peace."
A true powerhouse is called by different names depending on where he stands.
I'd lived my entire life on battlefields, yet laughably, the common people exalted me as a symbol of peace.
—Ep. 07 So This Is Regression Power?
"Boss, let's take care of our own goal first!"
Mel, my strategist, summed up the situation.
In this small country, the mid-sized 'Bloody Retribution Mercenary Company' had slipped in disguised as territorial troops, and the 'Stalwart Knight,' lowest-ranked of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent, was waiting somewhere.
Matters had grown, and the situation looked more complicated than expected.
"We've got to get word to Veil and Yuria!"
"That does come first."
But I had something more important than that.
"Wait a moment!"
After sharing the current situation and settling the schedule, Mel led the Kranel knights toward those who had invaded my mine.
Then she immediately issued an order for them to leave.
"All of you, withdraw."
The representative of the hostile baronial house showed no intention of withdrawing meekly.
"H-His Excellency Duke Robert has extended his protection to our House Hatia......."
He recited his backer and trailed off as though defying Mel.
'The Bloody Retribution Mercenary Company' had been hired at great expense and then disguised as territorial troops; considering that, this side had clearly invested a great deal of effort as well.
And it was true that a duke's name stood higher than that of Margrave Mel Kranel.
But to me, that didn't matter at all.
I stepped forward casually and asked.
"Would you care to compare whether the sword of a duke far away is faster, or my sword?"
"W-What do you......."
Whether a sword is sharper or harder doesn't matter at all.
As a rule, with blades of any kind, the closer one is the more dangerous.
"Between members of the same faction, must it come to this—."
Apparently deciding he couldn't reason with me, the baronial house's representative spoke toward Mel.
And Mel answered him in a startlingly aristocratic manner of speech.
"A faction, is it—. This is the first I have heard of Baron Hatia belonging to ours. At the investiture ceremony I shall call upon His Excellency Duke Robert together with His Highness the Second Prince and inquire about it. So stop dragging this out and withdraw."
In highly antiquated speech, Mel had essentially said: and what if a mere baron is in the same faction?
The representative, who hadn't yielded to my threats, pulled back his troops and left the territory at a single aristocratic word from Mel.
And so the territorial war ended with almost anticlimactic speed.
'I offer this war to the War God.'
I offered a perfunctory prayer to the piece-of-shit god and looked at the scene before me.
My mine, where the enemy soldiers had gone and peace had come.
At that sight, a question suddenly struck me.
"Mel, starting with you having two eyeballs and going all the way to the outcome of this battlefield, none of it makes sense."
The strength I built through effort.
The Mysteries I gained wandering a lifetime.
And the company members who swore eternity to me.
The power of regression looked greater than all of that combined.
Good results were coming far too easily.
"Mel, what in the world is regression?"
"It's completely broken! Veil didn't yap about Regression-Possession-Reincarnation for nothing, you know?"
"Hmm....... Are you speaking of those trashy books from that incomprehensible world?"
Vice-Commander Veil.
His martial force was decent, nothing outstanding.
Instead, he excelled at the art of using people, which neither I nor the other comrades possessed.
If he had one great flaw, it was that he was a lunatic who would prattle all night about a trashy book featuring some big-eared bastard.
'He used to prattle even in the middle of a battlefield.'
Veil often compared my battlefields to the shoddy battlefields in those trashy books.
"Big Brother! This is a reenactment of the Battle of Red Cliffs itself!!!"
I had heard so much about those trashy books that I remembered the rough terminology myself.
"That bastard called the Sleeping Dragon must've been a regressor."
A dragon lying down, hence the Sleeping Dragon.
A worm who, for all that he was a dragon, impudently lay about and got his lord and his family all killed.
His reading the stars to prophesy the future must have been a cover for his regression.
"That's the Three Kingdoms! It isn't Regression-Possession-Reincarnation! The trashy books Veil went on about come in way more kinds than you think, Boss!"
According to Mel, Veil had recited many kinds of trashy books to me.
The one he prattled about most was simply the trashy book called the Three Kingdoms.
Frankly, it was a subject I had no interest in.
"Briefly."
"It means regressing, possessing, and reincarnating are the most broken things going."
"You qualify for all three, Mel."
"Exactly!"
Mel possessed a body while reincarnating, and on top of that she had regressed.
"But you know, right? Veil said there's something above Regression-Possession-Reincarnation."
In our mercenary company, there was one power reckoned above all.
One that Mel's extraordinary mind couldn't comprehend.
One that not even the incomprehensible-world knowledge of Vice-Commander Veil, who claimed to have read over ten thousand trashy books, could explain.
And one that Yuria, the Mage Corps Commander who created the continent's first recovery potion, could not account for——.
"The Boss's monstrous strength."
She meant my monstrous strength.
And I, the owner of that monstrous strength.
"I'll put Regression Power on par with my monstrous strength."
I acknowledged the power of this thing called regression.
***
'Margrave Kranel's knight order has left the mine district?'
A giant of a man tilted his head as he watched the scene reflected in a magic tool.
Just then, a narrow-eyed man beside him thrust out his buckteeth and shouted.
"Hey, Sir Knight! Your eyeballs are about to fall out. How about sharing some information?"
"A vulgar mercenary, daring to—."
"Ten Great Knight or not, aren't you under the same employer as us? If you're a knight who disobeys his lord's word, then go right on working alone."
The foremost sword of Siegfried, the Magic King.
The lowest-ranked of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent, the Stalwart Knight.
He was the Stalwart Knight precisely because he was a man of stalwart loyalty.
Meaning that for his lord's sake he could deal even with vulgar mercenaries.
He frowned as he spoke.
"Baron Hatia has been defeated."
"What? Then what about our boys we sent over there?"
"All dead."
"No way, they aren't good enough to die to knights from a piddling kingdom like this? Bastards who can hunt ogres, how did they—."
"Shut up and listen."
The Stalwart Knight continued his explanation flatly.
At the part where the enormous knight of Margrave Kranel had butchered the Bloody Retribution mercenaries to a man, the company's commander started in shock and asked.
"Hah! There's a man bigger than you?"
The Stalwart Knight was a giant standing a little over two meters, clad in full plate armor grafted with Magical Engineering.
With his helm and combat boots on, he looked to be around two meters twenty.
"It seemed I would only match him with my helm on."
"Hah......."
Wasn't that a pseudo-giant?
Kyle, commander of the Bloody Retribution Mercenary Company, could not believe it at all.
But what followed was even harder to believe.
"The Margrave stepped in herself and ended the battle."
"What, the Margrave herself? Don't tell me they know about the mine's deposits too?"
When the Bloody Retribution commander tilted his head, the Stalwart Knight answered in a sour voice.
"I thought so as well, but that is not the case."
"Huh?"
"The Margrave's knights all went down along the mountain range together with a merchant company."
The commission they had received was to spark a civil war in the Kingdom of Alton.
And while at it, to find resources whose owners did not know their worth and swallow them whole.
The Arcane Ore mine of the Panier Barony was the prime example.
"Well, fuck, guess I'd better see this for myself, huh?"
The main body of the Bloody Retribution Mercenary Company was currently settled inside the ducal territory as territorial troops.
Its commander had just said he would step out himself, but—.
"No. I will go."
"You? Weren't you waiting in reserve as the asymmetric force? Don't tell me that giant knight bastard is that strong?"
The Stalwart Knight had stepped forward himself.
His purpose was—.
"That pitch-black greatsword the bastard was carrying. It is no ordinary thing."
It was Jack's spoil.