Vol 1 Chapter 21 (1/2)

Master and Student

“Oi, Wynn. In front of you…”

Faster than Locke could speak, with an explosive sound as he stepped, Wynn instantly accelerated.

“Wha-, what?”

“Where did he come from?”

Panicked, a pair of soldiers jabbed at him with their spears.

Without slowing down, he dodged the spear tips with small sidesteps.

In that moment, while the soldier’s weapons were extended, he slashed upwards at the defenseless soldiers’ sides into their chests.

“s.h.i.+-, s.h.i.+t.”

Another soldier drew his sword and tried to slash at him, but the bodies of his comrades killed by Wynn’s blade prevented him from attacking.

While the soldier was occupied, Wynn stabbed him from behind the corpses.

As the point struck the soldier in the chest, piercing through his heart, the light died from the soldier’s eyes.

As the blade was pulled out, the body fell forward.

A pool of blood spread onto the rocky ground, and the surroundings smelled of blood.

It was done all in a moment.

It was before the sentry soldiers had time to recover from their surprise and call for reinforcements.

Locke could only watch all this happen from behind.

Taking into account the fact that his magic power sealed by the “Magic Sealing Barrier”, Locke was completely surprised by Wynn’s nonsensical physical abilities.

Being evenly matched with those who use body strengthening magic, Locke realized that this was extraordinary.

Moreover, at that moment, with virtually everybody, friend and foe alike, unable to use magic, he realized that common sense had been overturned.

“Now there is n.o.body else anymore. Let’s go, Locke.”

After checking around the bend, Wynn started running.

Though he was thinking ‘I wasn’t really needed,’ Locke followed after Wynn.

Though he trained himself, without magic to strengthen him, Locke’s physical abilities were slightly better than an average soldier.

Wynn, who had joined up with Locke, proposed to go to the capital alone, while he should run and hide somewhere.[1]

However, Locke rejected the proposal.

It was reasonable.

Since Locke also wanted to become a knight.

To run away as Wynn suggested, as a friend, and as a comrade, he wouldn’t do it.

Wynn recognized his indomitable will, and gave in.

Wynn didn’t say another word about Locke’s refusal to temporarily flee.

If Wynn truly wanted, he could have left Locke behind in the blink of an eye, but instead, he matched Locke’s pace as they advanced.

It wasn’t like he was worried about him or anything.[2]

When asked about his reason for doing so, he replied that slowing down to a normal speed would allow him to take any enemies by surprise.

Certainly, after recently seeing a step able to propel him over ten paces in an instant, Locke believed that he could engage the enemy head on, and kill them before they could react.

This was what would normally happen when an ordinary knight faced off against a common soldier.

As they moved through the forest, Wynn told Locke about how he defeated the dangers that Locke and the other apprentice knights faced.

As Wynn recounted his story, Locke followed several steps behind him.

The total amount of Wynn’s magic power was far less than an average human’s.

The average commoner could still use spells like “Light”, “Firelight”, and elementary level defensive magic, but to create more than just fire or ice, but to use explosions or frost to occur in attack magic requires a large amount of magic power, and the average commoner could only try, before they would lose consciousness from running out of magic power. That was why his grades in the magic cla.s.ses were abysmal.

This was a handicap for him, who wanted to become a knight.

In a battlefield, magical combat was indispensable.

When a battle breaks out, the royal court magicians would chant ritual magic and cast magic for large-scale destruction and wide-area barriers. Meanwhile, catapults would fire incessantly in the downtime, then the knights would rain magic and the archers would fire arrows.

On a large-scale battlefield, Wynn would be useless as a knight.

That was why he aimed to become a knight by entering knight school.

Many of the knights from the knight school were a.s.signed to the Imperial Guard Knight Order, or the Royal Knight Order.

Though the imperial guards and royal knights were grouped together, there were actually differences between them.

Eminent n.o.bles made up the Imperial Guard Knight Order.

On the other hand, the lower-ranked n.o.bles and those from knight houses made up the Royal Knight Order.

Wynn’s goal, was the latter, the Royal Knight Order.

Unlike the Imperial Guard Knight Order, which needed connections to join and whose quality seemed to be deteriorating, the Royal Knight Order was made of the most elite knights.

The duties of the royal knights were of a larger breadth than the imperial guards, whose duty was to guard the imperial family. They served as the main line of defense for the palace and the capital.

At the center of the empire, they gathered intelligence, and also undertook escort missions of VIPs.

Their battlefield was the capital city, but there sometimes were times when they made use of their advanced education to infiltrate hostile areas.

Therefore, when they left for their battlefields, they weren’t clumsy.

They weren’t a force meant for large-scale battles, but were a knight order which made use of their individual fighting strength.

Though they didn’t escort the imperial family, the royal knight order, which occasionally escorted important state guests, was not an order one could enter with half-baked strength.

It was a very selective knight order.

Wynn had no other alternative than to aim for that place.

The inability to use magic was a large handicap for him.

Wynn had lost to long-range magic attacks since his first year examination.

So for the next examination one year later, he perfected a countermeasure.

“I, who has understood the way of fire, Fireball!”

When he decided that he wouldn’t be able to catch up, the vice-captain cast attack magic.

It was a well-used spell in the battlefield: when it hit the target, as it exploded, flames would spread. It was an attack magic with high killing potential.

As Wynn moved, as swift as the wind, unaffected by the bad terrain, he looked back as he heard the chant and felt the heat behind him.

His left hand flashed quickly.

A silver light cut through the air.

It was the same attack that had intrigued the vice-captain when the demonic beast had attacked.

Fundamentally, in the central part of the spell, was was something like a core, which, if hit, would have an effect.

In this case, the fireball would blow up, causing an explosion.

The silver light Wynn had launched — the short-sword Leticia had presented him with— flew into the fireball, as if it were absorbed.

In the next moment, flames burst out as the explosion boomed.

“Gah!”

Receiving the shock of the explosion from a close range, beginning with the vice-captain, the three knights were blown away, and hit the ground.

As the explosion subsided, the three men were on the ground, groaning.

Their legs were bent in impossible directions, and though they weren’t dead, blood flowed from their heads.

In order to escape from the explosion, as he threw the short-sword, at the same time, he dove into a ditch.

He approached the fallen knights.

The short-sword was stuck in a tree some ways off.

Despite having been hit with an explosion of that level, the short-sword Leticia had given him was not even covered with soot, and continued to give off a faint luminescence.

He returned the short-sword to the scabbard at his waist, and began running.

‘Near the fourth group is Locke’s group, the third group.’

‘It shouldn’t be only my group that ended up in this situation.’

Locke and Cornelia should still be defending against their attacks.

‘Estimating the time it would take for this plan of action, I should be able to save Locke in the third group.’

Wynn left, leaping lightly with energetic movements.

While he had saved up for the tuition by acting as an adventurer, he had gotten used to moving through places with bad footing.

Along the way, he felt an uncomfortable feeling, but he kept running without paying any attention to it. Right then, he was just in time to see Locke about to be killed.[?1?]

…

“At any rate, I think it was good that you came at that point.”

“It was thanks to you, Locke, that I realized magic was sealed. They ended relaxing their guard.”

“But well, something will soon be attracted to this smell…”

Locke patted his injured left arm and grimaced at the smell coming from his body.

His left arm was already wrapped in bandages, thanks to Wynn.

As the only survivors, they hurried to the fort to find out what had happened.

At the plaza in front of the entrance to the fort, where they had practiced camping the night before, lay two corpses.

They were Nigel and Irusu.

They were the knights who acted as the captains of the periodic subjugation mission.

“Now what do we do?”

“First of all, we should sabotage the magic amplifying device.”

They were hidden among the thickets as they surveyed the fort.

The drawbridge that led to the gate was raised, so a frontal infiltration seemed difficult.

Two soldiers stood guard from a window above the gate.

“Locke, this way.”

Wynn gestured, and stealthily moved towards the fort while hiding in the thickets.

While hiding from the patrolling soldiers and guards along the way, Wynn reached the moat surrounding the fort.

“I wasn’t just pretending to be an adventurer on the surface, I had to hide from monsters many times, you know?”

Wynn whispered with a proud expression on his face upon Locke’s admiration at his ability to discern well-hidden locations.

“Since they also can’t use magic here, we’re lucky that they can’t use any detection magic.”

That is why they tried to isolate themselves from all outsiders.

Soon, Wynn pointed towards an opening in the fort’s walls.

“We’ll get in from there.”

“What? But that’s—”

“It is where the kitchen waste is thrown into the river.”[3]

“Ewww….”

The amount of trash produced by a fort that often held a thousand people was not trivial.

Some of the waste could be used as fertilizer within the fort, but most of it was just thrown into the river, as is.

“There is another garbage chute, but…”

“…Let’s go with the kitchen waste one please.”

Fortunately, none of them had any heavy armaments.

They swam across the river, and climbed the stone wall into the chute.

“Ewww… it’s slimy…”

“Please bear with it.”

“This is nice and all, but how did you know about this place?”

“Every summer, for a fortnight[4], I partic.i.p.ate in the training that happens at the fort. I always work to clean this place.”

“Wow… It must be hard to clean this place in the summer…”

When it gets warmer, insects swarm and the stench is especially terrible.

Due to his experience at the on-site training during the summertime, he seriously doubted that anybody would clean this sort of place.

Only commoners like Wynn, would clean it when he came every year.

Normally, there were hired servants who would do it, but in this situation, he believed that there wouldn’t be any more of them in the fort.

‘They were probably all fired,’ Wynn thought.

As expected, there were no human presences in the fort’s kitchen.

Though there should have been some sort of detection magic guarding from the outside, it seemed that the magic sealing barrier had neutralised it.

They probably didn’t have enough personnel to guard every place.

Luckily, for that reason, no knights or soldiers approached this place.

The first thing they did after climbing out of the chute was to search for a cloth to wipe the slime off of their bodies.

As expected, even Wynn was slightly grossed out by that sort of thing.[5]

Exiting the kitchen, they accidentally met two patrolling soldiers, but after that, they had stealthily moved through the fort.

Their goal was to disrupt the magic amplification device.

Wynn didn’t judge whether or not the insurgents of coup d’état were in the right.

However, they were going to kill the all the students, including him and Locke.[?2?]

Due to that, Wynn saw them as an irreconcilable enemy.

Upon seeing his friend almost killed, he couldn’t find any more reason to forgive them.

The one with the largest war potential in Imperial Capital Simurgh, Leticia, would probably also have taken measures against the insurgent faction.

If Wynn understood Leticia’s full strength from the rumours, they might pose no threat to her, but having her magic sealed would still be harsh for her.[6]

However, whether or not her magic is unsealed, if it’s Leticia, she should somehow manage.

“Mu!? You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!”

“Hey, we’ve been discovered. Wynn!”

“I got it!”

Not unexpectedly, they were discovered as they climbed the staircase.

At the pointed, investigative voice, Locke’s feet instantly stopped, but Wynn had sped up.

However, Wynn’s feet also stopped after a while.

“Instructor Aldo… …”

“Cadet Wynn.”

There stood the man who had guided him for one short month.

“You really ended up being our final obstacle.”

A faint smile appeared on his face.

“I heard the situation from the slain knights in the forest. But, why did you have to also kill the students!?”

“…Anybody who can wield a weapon, though they may be students, could become a threat. We had already decided to do this when we began our plan.”

“If we were to be rendered powerless, there should have been another way.”

If the knight instructors took off their equipment, the students would also take off theirs.

Moreover, they could have just surrounded and captured them.

“That was one of our objectives, Cadet Wynn. You life has significance. If you died, that ‘Brave’ would undoubtedly become incensed. To where would that wrath be directed? Towards we who caused it to happen— the imperial knight order.”[7]

“… That… is certainly true…”

Locke reflexively agreed.

Seeing as Leticia adored Wynn so much, if he died, her wrath would definitely be directed towards them.

The problem was, it might not affect only the knight order, but probably affect the whole empire.

“In order to create the smallest scapegoat possible, this plan was refined. Right now, we can no longer pull back, so we must eliminate any possible obstacles to the plan.”

The knights and soldiers pointed their spear tips and blades at Wynn and Locke.

“The plan has already started! With the magic sealed, the last part is for them to experience it! We, the true knights, will make those pigs, who indulge in luxury without fighting, taste the extent of our power! Even if our enemies be students and children, and even the man the Brave calls ‘Master!’ ”

Aldo shouted out instructions to the soldiers.

Simultaneously, the soldiers stabbed out with their spears.

As the spear-tips approached, Wynn swung his sword.

The spear-tips in his blade’s path were cut off, and went flying, leaving only wooden sticks.