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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 1
Chapter Title: Black-Haired Knight King
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The world I first encountered was a vast frozen wasteland ruled by pristine white snow.
Days shorter than the night, cold that froze limbs solid.
This brutal snowcapped range killed even the toughest moss—it was no place for humans to survive.
Why had I been dropped in a hellhole like this? Was this bone-chilling cold even real?
I couldn't wrap my head around the sudden upheaval.
But the merciless freeze made even those basic questions pointless.
Because nothing mattered more than staying alive right now.
To survive, I crammed anything remotely edible into my mouth.
I dodged predators, burrowed under the snow, and trudged endlessly across the snowfields, one grueling step after another.
My body, clinging desperately to life, somehow endured day after day.
After two days of aimless wandering like that, I made it.
I spotted a village built by humans like me at the base of the mountain.
Joy surged through me. Pure elation.
The sight of fellow humans sent me sprinting toward the village like a madman.
But they weren't welcoming to outsiders. They bared their teeth in fear of my black hair.
Speaking a language I'd never heard, they hurled heavy clubs and spears at me.
I barely escaped with my life after a savage beating and had to skulk around the village outskirts for a while.
Still, it wasn't all for nothing.
As time wore on and I picked up bits of their tongue,
I learned this was a place called the Northlands.
And that down on the continent below, other races—not humans—made their home.
This wasn't the Earth I'd known.
'Elves who live a thousand years.'
'Orcs who master steel.'
Such thoughts crept in now and then.
What if the first to walk upright hadn't been some human alpha, but an elf?
What if the primal fire's discoverer, that omega spark, had been an orc instead of a person?
If the very notion that humanity stood alone got shattered, invaded by superior other primates...
Without a doubt, we'd end up like the Neanderthals—squeezed out and extinct by Homo sapiens.
And damn my luck, I'd been dumped into that very impossible world.
Humans, losers of the racial wars, driven north, slowly marching toward extinction. Their apocalypse. Their revelation. And I had front-row seats.
But what could a lone outsider like me change?
Not even my arrival here had been my choice. To the folks they called humans, I was just another species.
One person. One being. Solo.
If they were a vulnerable minority, I ranked even lower.
Yet I wanted to live.
Begging, stealing, scaling fences—I fought tooth and nail just to survive.
The brutal winter thawed into spring, gave way to sun-baked summer, then winter again.
Years blurred by—who knew how many—like snow piling up without a trace.
Bit by bit, I adapted to this miserable existence amid the unchanging permafrost.
Then came an unexpected shift, riding in on autumn winds that had no business blowing in the Northlands.
With a man whose very gaze dazzled like sunlight on fresh snow.
'Black hair! The same as mine.'
He had hair just like me and called himself a knight. A king.
He strode into our midst with a towering dream: escape this cramped, frigid Northlands and forge a human kingdom.
The first human knight! The first human king!
At last, amid our kind's path to oblivion, a hero had risen.
'What's your name?'
But it wasn't the hero's birth or extinction's reversal that woke me.
It was that he was the first to ask my name—the beast everyone shunned.
My name. What was it?
Filthy beast. Monkey. Scavenging beggar. Inferior furball. That's all I'd ever been called.
Centuries of numb surrender had wiped every memory clean.
'Come with us.'
He didn't care about any of that.
He carved out a place for me, let me belong to a group for the first time.
I shed the soul-crushing isolation of a mere onlooker and became one of the 'humans.'
It felt like salvation itself.
'The Northlands is our mother.'
No grand ideals for me. No ideology.
Building a human kingdom? Might as well chase clouds.
Still, I gripped my shield out front, more than anyone, thrusting that dull spear with raw courage.
Time brought more scars, merits stacking up as experience.
Not bloodlust or war madness—this was my quest for a new identity.
And in time,
I became the Knight King's squire.
'How long you live doesn't matter. It's how you live that counts.'
'Broken Sword! That's your name.'
I took the sword. Took the name.
Shed the old skin binding me to the past. Claimed a fresh name for a new life.
With heaven's mandate upon me, humanity's golden age dawned.
Sages rivaling elven wisdom.
Warriors matching orc ferocity.
Heroes flocked to the banner.
Frail humans donned steel, forged into elite troops through relentless training.
We surged beyond the unified Northlands into the heartlands flowing with milk and honey.
The human kingdom rose—the one western elves and southern orcs had dreaded.
Of course, the outsider's curse clung to me. I never became a knight.
But I didn't despair. I backed the continent's leads with all my heart.
To aid the king's vision, even a fraction. Even as a lowly scabbard of a life, I'd give everything.
I figured that dream would last till my dying breath.
'Why the tears, squire?'
Like the philosopher's butterfly blurring dream and reality, my dream was just a fleeting spring slumber.
'Because you're dying.'
On the grandest battlefield, the greatest Knight King fell.
No wife, no heir. Just one sword left behind.
He hoped we'd rally, carry his will even in his absence.
But no one gathered around his blade except me.
'The king is dead.'
Heroes scattered. The kingdom crumbled like sandcastles in the tide.
The army and realm he'd built his life around turned coats overnight.
Were humans unfit to build nations? What the hell had we fought for?
Before we could question our implosion, elves and orcs marched in, carving up the fractured humans.
A leaderless inferno.
Armies buried alive. Humans hacked apart, limbs strung on hooks without mercy.
A slaughter near-genocidal, crashing down on kingdom-dreaming humanity.
Nothing I could do.
Just like that first day, alone in the Northlands.
But in his final moments, the king laid one last charge on his lone survivor.
'Find my heir.'
Greatness isn't born of blood.
True nobility shapes in the cradle we build, not some womb.
As his eyes dimmed, he saddled me with a burden too vast to drop.
Find the next king to lead humanity.
My inescapable final mission.
The king dead, heroes gone—
Eight years on.
I still hadn't found the heir.
All that's left is this unwanted tale of a mere squire.