I will become a Knight.
I will protect those who stand behind my back.
I will erase the Demon Realm.
If you follow those words upward, you can see what Enkrid truly wants.
'Ordinary life.'
An ordinary life laid over with peace and overlaid with smiles.
The fruit seller greets you with a smile, and someone roasts potatoes over the stove fire to share with a hungry child.
A deft-handed barmaid clicks her tongue and raps the child on the head, yet looks after such kids all the same.
Those who went far away return and hand out presents.
Everyone cries sometimes, but they also smile and meet each coming day.
Yes—this is the Today Enkrid desired most.
The ultimate day he dreamed of through his life.
Then can he say he's experienced that day now?
In part, yes.
In that case, isn't it enough to guard only his own fence? So these days repeat?
It is.
Is there any reason to widen that fence?
There isn't.
Enkrid listened to the answer rising from within. It wasn't wrong.
"Yes, this is exactly what you wanted."
Will settled into the Ferryman's words. It was conviction and declaration. And on top of that, the Ferryman granted a reprieve.
"For a time, 'Today' will continue. So you can choose whenever you wish."
In other words, do nothing for now and enjoy it.
Waking from sleep, Enkrid spent a day as usual. The Ferryman's words made sense. The Today he truly wants continues. Training is joyful and the thrill of growth remains.
"Your training will continue. Isn't it enjoyable?"
The Ferryman came at night and asked. It was.
Not everything turns by repeating Today. Even after death, what Enkrid had trained and learned had remained in his body.
Was that also a gift from the Ferryman?
Be satisfied like this?
His aim is not to wander rough mountain roads, but to spend a comfortable day at a snug home.
"Is everyone busy?"
The next day, Enkrid asked Audin as he passed by.
"These days, Ragna too—everyone's been industrious."
Rem was absorbed in drilling his unit, and Ragna, keeping ten swordsmen under him, was busy swinging his sword.
Pel, who'd been hovering nearby, cut in.
"Why? Should I gather everyone?"
Pel was Enkrid's adjutant, and Lawford was Ragna's adjutant.
Even after becoming Knights, those roles hadn't changed.
In truth, if not for Lawford, Ragna's subordinates would be hard to control, while Pel stayed simply because he wanted to stick here.
"Let's see them around evening."
One could say Enkrid was the head of the Mad Knight Order and the lord of the Border Guard domain.
A few clueless nobles even eyed the Border Guard with suspicion, wondering if they were founding a new kingdom there.
Enkrid himself had little interest in such talk, but in any case, he had rarely ever gathered his Order by force until now.
Not a command handed down in the heat of battle, but asking calmly like this to call people—that was a first.
He'd been that way from his squad-leader days until now.
And as Pel listened to Enkrid, the fine hairs on his body stood on end.
'Why?'
His tone was calm and his attitude the same as ever. There was therefore no reason for this.
In Pel's gaze he saw Audin. Smiling, Audin stood and offered a prayer.
"O Lord Father, are my hands required? Do you speak that through this man?"
What's he on about now?
Pel ignored it and decided to call the Order. First Rem—no, Rem would be last.
"Understood."
Ignoring the chill his instincts sensed, Pel moved. For days now, Ragna had been catching the sunrise and swinging his sword from morning to dusk.
He wasn't honing some refined technique or sword-art, nor enjoying sparring.
Like a primer for the Northern-Style Greatsword Form, he set his stance, cut downward, thrust, cut on the diagonal, then again stabbed one-handed, wrapped and flipped, wrapped and entered—repeating the fundamentals.
It was the same training Pel himself ran through every day.
'Your foundation must be solid to climb higher.'
So Enkrid had taught. Pel had learned much, knowing and unknowing, watching Enkrid.
In truth, it was the same for everyone else.
'You'd divide a Knight's stages?'
Pouring Will into a technique—that's Beginner.
Then, when you infuse a technique with your own individuality, that's Intermediate.
Advanced is when you're no longer bound by technique.
'He said there's a Highest grade beyond that, too.'
What was that? To have variability?
To be free to be a circle at times and an awl at others—something like that.
Pel had experienced omnipotence.
It was a feeling that truly anything could be done, flooding his whole body.
If he reached out, he felt like he could touch the sun; with a single cut, he felt like he could slice the ridgeline of a far-off mountain.
Fall drunk on that sense, and you pour out all your Will and suffer collapse.
Pel had collapsed too. Only, for him the mountain wasn't Pen-Hanil, and for him the sun wasn't up in the sky.
'The Captain.'
Sun, mountain, and Enkrid are synonyms to him.
So he went to Enkrid and got a thorough beating.
Some might have sung despair and frustration and fallen apart then.
Hearing talk that divided Knightly levels based on Beginner and Intermediate might have made them sick.
You finally became a Knight and they tell you you have to climb higher?
Among the Empire's so-called Hothouse Knights, some would be like that.
Naturally, Pel was not.
In truth, the whole Mad Knight Order was not.
'I can climb higher.'
Knowing there was a height above was only more welcome.
If this were the end, he would have been disappointed instead.
And he now understood why he was idly lost in thought here.
Ragna, swinging a sword alone, had a force like a wall that refused approach.
'Why so grim?'
It was like finding the traces of a massive Lycanthrope colony that had set its sights on sheep.
A fight hadn't broken out yet, but he suddenly recalled those days when, with a hard fight ahead, everyone sharpened their spearheads on the whetstone.
'Ah.'
Only then did Pel see it too.
Every one of them was preparing for something.
Whsssh!
A hot gust blew in the wake of Ragna's swing. If you set a blade on the wind, could it take on a physical edge as-is?
It made no sense, but if it were Ragna, he could do such a thing.
"Why are you here again?"
Lawford, who'd been training nearby, came over and asked.
"I've got a message."
Pel knew Ragna wore a grim force. He wasn't idling away his time—he was buttoning and honing his edge.
Why?
There's only one reason.
Because there's only one person who sets the mood in the Border Guard—or in the Mad Knight Order.
"He says gather at evening."
"All right."
Lawford was quick on the uptake. He didn't ask who had called. Only the Captain could call Ragna.
After that, Pel went to find Jaxen and headed to a shop that sold tea and desserts.
A blonde beauty greeted him.
'This place always makes me weirdly tense whenever I step in.'
What had been a vague feeling last time was a little clearer now.
'Two on the roof.'
One under the counter.
People hidden here and there.
"There are more than you're sensing, so don't do anything foolish."
Jaxen had appeared before he knew it. He hadn't even sensed the approach, yet suddenly Jaxen was behind him.
He whipped his head around and saw Jaxen, eyes narrowed. The moment their eyes met, he felt gazes from every direction.
'If I fight here, I'll just get taken down.'
Not that he was going to fight. He just felt like he'd stepped into a net someone had set.
"I went a little overboard again after a while, so I'm bad at holding back. Why are you here?"
As Jaxen opened his mouth, the unease ebbed.
What was that just now? It had been like pressure, but a little different.
It was laying Will over his five senses, then spreading it across a Domain. A craft that went beyond seeing, hearing, and feeling with will—outward into diffusion and detection.
That was the identity of the déjà vu Pel had felt.
On a previous battlefield with Aspen, Jaxen had used this technique of seeing, hearing, and feeling with will to pick out enemies and kill them.
Now he'd gone a step further than that.
"We're to gather at evening."
Jaxen nodded. The feeling of déjà vu from him had already vanished cleanly.
He was the same as usual now. As Pel left, the blonde beauty called to him:
"Goodbye, cute little shepherd."
Pel gave a noncommittal nod and barely took two steps out of the shop before stopping.
'I've never seen her before.'
How does she know I'm a shepherd?
He hadn't even stated who he was.
Granted, he knew she was Jaxen's lover. Did that mean that stoic Jaxen clammed up by day then chattered on and on in bed? That Jaxen? It didn't suit him.
Of course, it wasn't that.
Geor's Dagger was an assassination guild and also an intelligence guild.
It made no sense for such people not to know a fine blade working within their sphere of activity.
Above all, even setting Geor's Dagger aside, the Mad Knight Order was already famous.
They'd been in one big thing after another.
Starting with ending the civil war and becoming the Demon-Slayer.
Inside Nauwil, there were even those who thought the stalemated Southern front would be decided if the Mad Knight Order joined the fighting.
Well, that was just what they thought.
Battles aren't won or lost by words tossed over a desk.
Rem was inside the mountains, tracking and killing the traces of monsters, and when Pel found him, he was dealing with five Trolls.
'Five have ringed him.'
The five Trolls had matched hands and feet and formed a round.
A surrounding formation. Monsters could be surprisingly cunning. Trolls were especially so.
They even knew how to fight using their own regeneration. They couldn't use tactics as well as Luagarne, but they knew how to ring a single human.
All five Trolls gripped stout wooden clubs.
You might wonder where they'd found them, but now wasn't the time to care.
Standing among the five, Rem's lips twisted. Through the side of one Troll's waist, his grin showed.
Then his axe moved. Never once meeting the Trolls' clubs head-on, his axe was like a salmon running upriver.
After a few chops, five Troll heads were in the air. No monster lives with its head cut off, so that was the end of them.
Wading out from between the five corpses that bled black, Rem said:
"Just because every side is blocked, do you think there's nowhere to slip through? No—there's always a gap. If you give up, that's when you die, you idiots."
His way of training his unit was already notorious.
It lacked nothing to be called rough, and in unison they answered:
"Ha!"
Had he even made them answer with kiai?
"Sorry to feed you half-baked monster blood."
Talking to his axe, Rem flicked his eyes to Pel.
"We're to gather at evening."
He left out who had called this time too, but they understood just fine.
"Should've called us sooner."
Rem bared his teeth in a grin. Meeting that grin, Pel's stomach churned.
The force had shifted, and Rem's pressure pressed down on the area round about.
"We'll all die, Captain!"
One of the unit shouted. Rem kept his grin and said:
"Endure. No one's dying from this much."
If even Pel found it oppressive, how easy would it be for non-Knights to bear it?
Still, it wasn't his business. He wasn't about to meddle in another unit's training.
Enkrid's own guard, for that matter, were probably running fairly aggressive drills themselves.
"Then I'll go."
With a nod, Pel turned back. It was summer, so the days were long. With the late afterglow, they lit a bonfire.
Crack, crack.
Over it they grilled meat, and they set out fruit and jerky and the like. Krais had brought them. Beside him was Abnaier as well.
The Fairy and the Witch were there too. Pel hadn't even delivered the message to that side, but they'd come of their own accord.
In the same tone and manner as always, Enkrid spoke to everyone gathered.
"We're going to hunt the Balrog."
The content itself wasn't exactly everyday.
But no one tried to stop him. Not one person was even flustered.
Luagarne nodded first.
"We waited long."
Well, Pel felt much the same. Strength had come into his hands. To say he didn't want to swing it would have been a lie.
He wanted to test his limits and step forward. If Pel felt that way, the others would be similar.
"We've waited."
Rem laughed as he spoke, and Ragna stood, gathering up his sword.
"Where are you going, brother?"
Seeing that, Audin asked, and Ragna looked at Enkrid and asked dully:
"The Balrog—aren't we going now?"
How was he going to find it, in the night with no sun and not even knowing where it was?
"I'll guide the way."
Ragna spoke brimming with confidence.
"Do you even know where it is?"
Rem asked.
"If we walk, we'll get there."
To that firm answer, Enkrid cut in.
"Not now."
He truly meant they would hunt the Balrog, but not right this instant. He was showing resolve.
Resolve not to remain in the comfort of an ordinary Today.