"Do you know who that blond is?"
It was when not even two days had passed since they came back. Kraiss chased the identity of the bastard who had put a hole in Enkrid's stomach. It was one of his habits born of anxiety.
Even if you don't know who the opponent is, you gather bits and pieces of information like this to find out.
A guy who faces Enkrid and Ragna alone and wins overwhelmingly?
'Is that even possible?'
Kraiss was also part of the knight order, but he wasn't that good at fighting. Still, he knew well how difficult and hard what he had just weighed in his head was.
'Unless even Rionesis Oniak came back alive.'
No, that one was a great figure who established and organized swordsmanship, but there's no way to know if he actually possessed outstanding skill.
'Would a Knight of Duskforge be enough?'
A Knight of Duskforge was one of those stories passed around by kids more than in history books. One of those heroic epics minstrels love to sell.
Back when there was no light in the world and only darkness, they said he split the sky with a single sword.
'That's going too far.'
No matter how much it was just a story, the exaggeration was severe.
Kraiss had read many books, and he'd spent a long time listening to rumors too. Even if the opponent wasn't a Knight of Duskforge, he could think of a few other knights who could suppress those two at the same time.
'The dragon slayer, for instance.'
They said it was a knight who killed some evil dragon.
Since it was the time when dragons existed, this too was still a protagonist from a minstrel's tale.
'What about the Beastman King?'
A beastman who led all the beastmen who had lived spread out as slaves and built a country on the frontier was the Beastman King.
This one, at least, was a great figure said to have existed historically.
'Though it's the beastmen's oral history.'
Seeing that Dunbakel, the knight order's only beastman, didn't even know that existence, it would be a story handed down only among some beastmen.
Even so, historians in many places across the continent had proven the Beastman King's existence.
'So to face those two at the same time, doesn't it become a story that's only possible if you're at least myth or legend?'
That was Kraiss's conclusion.
"We'll see him again, right?"
That was why he asked Enkrid like this.
"We'll see him."
"Good. Then what about preparations?"
"I already did them this morning."
He trained without wasting a single day. That was the only preparation.
Kraiss accepted the scattered problems, including the blond and demons, and said,
"Fight without me."
Isn't it a situation that makes you want to immediately get out of the city and hide in some rural backwater?
"You pick fights with every demon in the Demon-lands, and now an absurd swordsman is showing up too? Huh? Why is our situation this uniquely harsh? We didn't carve up the face of the Goddess of Fortune or something, did we?"
Getting talkative was a sign of anxiety. Kraiss knew himself well. He took a breath and said as if repeating it to himself.
"Well, if you know and still don't prepare, that's being an idiot."
Kraiss looked like he was about to cry. Enkrid found it funny and let out a snort of a laugh. He was talking by himself and answering by himself, wasn't he.
"Don't laugh. I'm serious here."
Kraiss was consistent. He took a breath and opened his mouth again.
"Even if you don't know, I think what we have to do is weigh all sorts of possibilities and prepare."
***
Through a few conversations with Kraiss, Enkrid found what he had to do. If you know, prepare.
There was no one who knew demons better than a witch. Esther had, more than once, told him warnings about beings like that, so he asked her.
"Do you know how to kill a demon?"
There are many demons left in the Demon-lands. Truly, many.
Still in leopard form, Esther used her claws to write letters into the dirt ground.
'Wait.'
Esther, who had spent days as a leopard and then returned, came to find Enkrid right away. That was now.
"Hey."
To the witch who said she waited, Enkrid lifted a hand to show he was glad. No matter how cold and sharp the winter wind was, if someone was beside you, you could share warmth with that person.
"Want to walk a bit?"
Enkrid said again.
Seeing the sky dim, it looked like it would snow around dawn. He could be wrong about rain, but maybe because of his experience on campaign, he was good at calling snow.
Snowflakes were the enemy of every soldier.
The memory of making excuses to Shinar back then and avoiding shoveling snow came back to him. A familiar memory.
"Sure."
Esther answered and came up to his side.
With the city's night as their backdrop, the two set off. There were several paths to the training grounds. They chose the longest one. It was a route that didn't go through the city center, but looped around the outskirts.
From far away, Border Guard looked like it was wrapped by three large roads, and what they were walking was the stone path laid along the very outside, around the edge of the city. It wasn't a time for people to come and go, but patrols carrying lanterns were obligated to check this place.
What they ran into was one of those patrol teams.
"For glory."
One fresh recruit with discipline pulled tight, and two soldiers who deserved to be called veterans. Three to a team.
It was a manpower composition made because three handled things better than two. Kraiss had said it was Abnaier's concept made real, or something like that.
Kraiss was the type to spill every story, important or not, so Enkrid had heard all sorts of things through his mouth.
"Good work."
Enkrid gave a nod and passed, but the recruit couldn't take his eyes off Esther.
From the black-fur coat reflecting light in a strange way, she looked like she could enchant people. With the lantern reflecting, the shadows on her face would look twice as mysterious every time you saw her in the day.
Blue eyes, a nose bridge that carved shadows clearly—if you split beauty into standards, it was beauty on par with a fairy.
'A goddess?'
The recruit thought.
"Eyes."
The woman who resembled a goddess muttered. One of the veteran soldiers tugged the recruit's shoulder.
"Do you want to go blind?"
There was no joking in that.
"You can't stare at the black flower for long. Half-wit."
The recruit, tensed tight, followed the two seniors and vanished into the darkness. As Enkrid stepped forward, he asked,
"You didn't actually pluck out a few soldiers' eyeballs, did you?"
"I've never plucked them out."
Even so, the fear had been very clear, hadn't it? While Enkrid thought for a moment, Esther added,
"I blinded them for about two days."
Esther was a witch, but she didn't cast spells on just anyone. There was a proper reason behind her actions. Enkrid believed that.
"It was truly fun."
Esther smiled as she brushed her hair up with her hand. No matter how you looked at it, it was a smile full of something sly.
Of course, if an ordinary man saw it, there would be people who would offer up their lives to a single smile like this.
'I can't understand every action.'
She'd handle it.
Esther would have her own standards too.
Enkrid walked as if shaking thoughts off. Esther walked with him at his side.
For a while, the two walked without speaking, looking around.
"Sir."
They ran into another group. It was members of the Gilpin Guild who called themselves the night watch guarding the city's night.
Recognizing Esther and Enkrid, they stopped and bowed their heads instead of a military salute.
"Good work."
Enkrid brushed past them without any fuss. They too were three to a team. This side too had long since become Kraiss's private information guild, so it was natural they moved in a structure similar to a patrol team.
Even if the routes they came and went on were different.
After they passed them too, a few faint presences approached and then withdrew. They would be the people Jaxon had with him.
"To face them, you have to know them."
When there was no presence at all around them anymore, Esther opened her mouth. Enkrid was walking with a small wall piled of stone on his right.
There was no need to ask who "they" meant here. Esther didn't wait for an answer and spoke again.
"Do you see the stars?"
Clouds covered the sky, but now and then a few bits of starlight stuck their heads out. With not a single light around, the starlight was clearer.
"I see them."
Enkrid glanced up and answered.
"In the past, a number of mages gathered and built a tower."
A story he'd heard somewhere followed.
"The tower's name was the Tower of Wisdom."
All the mages who built the tower laid hands on forbidden arts and summoned the lords of the Demon-lands and twelve Balrogs.
An event where a gate to another world opened and drove the world toward the omen of destruction.
"Their wish was to become the stars in the sky."
Esther said it, stretching her right index finger up toward the sky. Enkrid's gaze went not to her finger, but to her eyes.
"Ascension. A demon's purpose is not different from that."
A demon was already half-immortal. Would the Lord of a Hundred Thousand Wraiths die because its lifespan ran out? Then why do they live? For what?
"Becoming the stars in the sky is called ascension."
It was the demons' purpose. They wanted to climb to the sky with everything they had.
"Among countless mages who flaunted wisdom, not one knew how to ascend. Do you think demons would know? If they did, they would have already done something, whether the continent turned into a sea of blood or not. The fact they didn't means they don't know how to ascend either."
After Esther stopped speaking, she walked two more steps and asked,
"So, what will you do now? They're the kind that say they'll become those stars up there. For all sorts of experiments, they'd consider killing a few thousand people a trivial thing."
They weren't beings you could kill just by cutting them, because they had physical substance. Demons were beings like that. Esther finished what she had to say.
Enkrid opened his mouth.
"What do you mean, what."
Esther also looked into Enkrid's eyes. Those eyes were no different from starlight that pierced the dark. The words those blue-shining eyes spoke hadn't changed in the slightest from before.
When they first met and now, he was the same person. Nothing had changed.
"I'll fight."
The lords of the Demon-lands placed no value on human life, and they didn't hesitate to urge war and fighting.
That was why this man would fight. Without retreating even a little, he would fight like that until his life burned away and disappeared.
'And I'll be at his side.'
Esther vowed it inside. Was only a knight's oath the kind that held power as a vow?
A vow made upon mana was as valuable as a knight's oath. The witch nodded as if submitting to the demonic charm that had bewitched her.
"Yeah. You will."
To face demons, she would be very busy. Even if she fought while offering up her life, she couldn't promise victory.
If you had no anxiety, you weren't human. In that sense, Esther was deeply human. Because she was human, she felt anxiety.
Starlight shone on the two of them. Esther placed her hand over Enkrid's heart.
Thump-
Before she turned from leopard to person, the sound of Enkrid's heartbeat had been Esther's lullaby. To that beat, Esther's heart also beat the same.
"My heart settles."
Esther said. Enkrid closed his mouth and waited a moment so she could be reassured enough.
The fear that had faintly shown in her eyes slowly disappeared. Like salt dissolved in water, it scattered down under a blue lake.
The two passed three times—patrols, the Gilpin Guild, even the group of Jaxon's subordinates—but on the fourth, they didn't notice, far away, the eyes of those watching the city's night.
A fairy had eyesight that saw at night as in daytime, so even from far away, it recognized the two clearly. That was why its presence didn't get caught by these two.
A scout from the city of Kirheis quietly memorized the sight of the two of them.
It was a sight it had to deliver to the queen who was training with life on the line inside the city.
***
Enkrid came back, washed, and lay down. His bedroom was on the third floor of the small fortress.
Every time Enkrid was away, Kraiss had fixed up the knight order's training grounds and also put effort into the lodgings.
Before he knew it, he'd made a castle like a small fortress.
Beyond the window, snow began to blow. In a lightly blowing wind, the snow drifted down gently and quietly covered the world.
Closing his eyes like that, Enkrid fell asleep, and he dreamed.
"This is as far as it goes."
Who?
He recognized it was a dream, but though he spoke with his own mouth, it wasn't a voice coming out by his own will.
It was a strange feeling. Like he was opening and closing his mouth underwater.
"I'm only this far."
His mouth opened separate from his will. Someone who was himself and also someone else howled and dropped to their knees. Everything he felt and saw had an unreal texture, like it was made of grains of sand.
"I can't choose."
Frustration and despair seeped in. All he had right now was helplessness. He couldn't move even a finger. He only lay still, trembling with suffering.
Then he died. His life cut off. When he opened his eyes again, he thought he would see the ferryman, but it wasn't that at all.
"Damn it, do I have to stop this?"
It was like just before. Words came out of his mouth, but it was a woman's voice. She had very large, thick hands. The sensation in his right hand was unusual. Right then, what she was holding came into view.
A spear big enough to be called a small pillar. He could recognize it as a shape, but the fine details of the weapon's form or the surrounding situation didn't all enter his head.
'What is this?'
The ferryman's trick? It was a reasonable suspicion. The 'self' who held the spear, and also 'her,' faced the wave of monsters and beasts he had never seen before and died.
Each one was a thing that wouldn't be out of place taking a name from the Demon-lands. The notable thing was that every single one was huge. And above, a monster flew around spraying black liquid.
'A dragon?'
He'd never seen it before, and it was made of grains of sand, but from that sight it was hard to associate it with anything else.
His body was torn, arms and legs ripped off. His guts burst and something streamed down from the corner of his mouth.
The pain was dull, like a blunt knife pressed over leather clothes, so it wasn't agonizing. Everything around him wasn't just made of grains of sand—he saw even that like looking into a blurry mirror.
He died again. He didn't know the process. What he felt was only an instant. Like that, several dreams brushed past.
When he experienced dozens of situations in an instant and woke up, he was leaning his back against the swaying side of a boat.