Chapter 2

Translator: Willia

The early spring forest was unusually full of a fresh, green scent, perhaps because the snow of the past winter had just melted. The smell of earth, of trees, of new shoots, and every other smell of living things. Even the morning sunlight seemed to carry a fragrance of its own.

But there was also a smell that did not belong among these. It was the smoke and burnt odor rising from a crackling woodfire.

Somewhere in the hunting grounds of the County of Winsloe, which Count Aethelred ruled, stood a small hut that looked on the verge of collapse.

It wasn't the kind of hut used by rangers or foresters; it was an old thing that seemed to have stood there since long ago, from before the Conquest War.

That it had not yet crumbled was due only to the crude but continuous effort put into its upkeep.

Children's hearts naturally settled on things the grownups paid no mind to, and perhaps the hut survived precisely because, generation after generation, it had been the children's own domain.

The burnt smell was coming from beside that hut. By the time Valery, Harold, and Gidwin arrived, five or six children had already lit a fire and were dressing rabbits and squirrels, peeling the hides, pulling out the innards.

Two of them looked about the same age as Valery's group; the rest were really just small children, not yet ten, or somewhere around there.

"Huh? It's the chief."

A boy with a helmet several sizes too big perched on his head pointed their way and called out.

At that, everyone turned at once. They looked first at Harold, but as their eyes shifted to Valery, their faces turned to astonishment.

"What, he really came?"

"Whoa......"

Valery, Harold, Gidwin, and a few others lived inside the castle, but the rest of the children lived outside its walls.

The children from outside the castle were seeing Valery for the first time, and at the sight of his handsome face, they were stunned speechless.

The boy with the helmet came trotting over and pressed himself close to Valery's side, looking up at him. The child murmured, eyes grown wide behind the helmet,

"An angel. An angel......"

"See? Told you, Hakon. He's really good-looking."

Harold smiled with satisfaction and ruffled Hakon's head. The helmet tipped askew, and Hakon flailed about for a moment because he couldn't see in front of him.

Once Harold reached the spot, he settled naturally onto the stump of a huge tree. It looked perfectly suited for sitting, but the fact that no one else had taken the place suggested that among the children, that stump carried something like the meaning of a throne, one only Harold was allowed to sit on.

In any case, every gaze stayed fixed on Valery and refused to let go. Though the attention would have felt burdensome, Valery did not seem to notice it at all and simply sat down on a stone that was at least reasonably flat.

"You've all heard about him, but some of you haven't met him, right? This is Wid. Wid, these are my friends. Starting with this one, Rok, Guido, Tommy......"

Harold introduced them one by one. Each time Valery's eyes came to rest on one of them, the boy in question looked away.

The last was the boy in the helmet.

"And that one's Hakon."

As if he'd been waiting for his turn, Hakon blurted out something quite out of nowhere.

"You know what this helmet is? This is the famous Helm of Terror. The one Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer wore. How about that? Pretty amazing, right?"

Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer was none other than the most famous ancestor of House Vǫlsungr, a legendary hero revered by every Nordic. To Valery, he was a great-grandfather.

His grandfather was Sigmund the Avenger, his father was Helgi the Berserkbane, and he himself was Valery the Heartless.

The trouble was that Valery had actually seen the real Helm of Terror, before regression. Unfortunately, what Hakon had on his head didn't even rise to the level of a passable replica.

That said, helmets as a thing were hard to make and therefore expensive, and not everyone could own one. Even among soldiers who took part in real battle, there were plenty who had none.

From that angle, though it was hardly a legendary artifact, it was at least worth showing off.

"He just picked that up somewhere in the woods. If you humor him, he'll keep bragging about it forever, so ignore him."

Gidwin leaned in and quietly warned Valery. But Valery's thoughts ran a little differently.

"Still, even if we can't know the name, somebody wore it. If it was picked up here, then whoever it was died here. That rules out the Beast Wars, so maybe it was from the Conquest War? If it means that much, it might well be worth bragging about."

The Beast Wars referred to the Succession War fought during the current King's days as a prince. Roughly thirty years ago.

It was famous for having pitted the first-generation warriors who had made their names during the Conquest War against the younger warriors of the new age.

Put simply, it had been a fight between princes backed by the first-generation warriors and princes backed by the younger ones.

At that time, many combatants fought wearing the pelts of wolves or tigers or bears, and from a distance it really did look like beasts fighting beasts, which was how the Beast Wars had got its name.

Most of the fighting back then had taken the shape of large, decisive engagements rather than scattered local skirmishes, and since the sites of those engagements were reasonably well known, that was how Valery had just reasoned it through.

Winsloe itself had not been one of the major battle zones.

"......"

But the others just stared blankly at Valery, as though they hadn't understood him, or as if to ask what on earth he was on about. And indeed, they hadn't understood a word.

Harold, however, was different. He wore a satisfied smile as he spoke.

"I knew it, Wid. I figured you'd be someone I could actually talk to. You know this too? A long time ago, there weren't any titles like we have now. Chieftains like the Jarls and Earls ruled the land, and it was only after His Majesty the current King that titles like Duke and Count came into being."

"More precisely, the founding King tried to put the system in place but died before he could, and the current King carried it through. A chieftain raises his own forces and holds his own authority without the King's interference, but a title has to be granted by the King. The first-generation men would have felt like their rights were being taken from them. They'd have felt betrayed, even."

"So, was that really necessary? Creating the titles?"

"Depends on the point of view."

"What's yours, then? Wid."

"What's yours?"

Truth be told, that exchange had bordered on disloyal, because it concerned one of the current King's greatest policies, his signature achievement.

So when Harold asked for his answer, Valery turned the question back on him, and Harold's face stayed just as it had been, smiling.

"What the hell are you two even talking about?"

Gidwin, just like the other children, asked with a baffled expression.

The gap in their education was so wide that the other children couldn't follow anything about past history, especially not a discussion about what it meant.

"So, is it the Helm of Terror or isn't it?"

"You shut up for a minute. Let's cook the meat. Some of them have to head back early."

Gidwin cut through Hakon's off-topic question and took charge of the situation. The children began skewering the pieces they'd already cleaned onto branches and setting them over the fire.

Gidwin sprinkled the herbs he'd brought without the slightest restraint. They weren't particularly expensive spices. They'd been gathered from the surrounding land and served only to cover the gamey smell and other off odors. He also poured salt on generously.

A mouthwatering aroma rose almost at once, and the children chattered away, excited, on every silly subject under the sun.

Before long, whether the meat was properly done or not, each one grabbed a skewer and started tearing into it. One boy would rip off a leg and hand it to the boy next to him, and from somewhere lukewarm ale appeared, and they passed it back and forth as they drank.

Meat and drink at the crack of dawn. It made for a fairly respectable birthday gathering.

As spirits rose, so did the pitch of conversation. But among the talk were a few remarks that sounded distinctly dangerous.

"......so this worthless little bastard was acting all big, and I turned him into half a cripple, I swear I did."

"Quit your bullshit."

"It's not bullshit. Look, I beat the bastard and took this off him. A war trophy, you could say."

The boy named Tommy pulled something out from behind a fallen tree and held it up. Astonishingly, it was a Viking-style sword.

The sight of the unexpected object cut the chatter short for a moment.

"Is that thing real?"

Someone broke the brief silence and asked.

In reply, Tommy drew the sword. It was a real blade, honed to a wicked blue edge. The air, which had been warm and lively a moment ago, seemed to cool in an instant.

"Who'd you beat up?"

Gidwin asked Tommy.

"Dunno. Who cares about his name? One of Lecton's Gang, probably."

Lecton's Gang were the thugs of a nearby city. Whether they had ties to the Thieves' Guild was unclear.

The Thieves' Guild existed in every city in the world, though they differed in size and sophistication from one place to the next; in any case, tangling with them was something to be avoided if at all possible.

For better or worse, the city wasn't one where Valery, before regression, had based himself.

"You're gonna get yourself killed, pulling shit like that."

Gidwin spoke sternly, in warning.

"Killed? Me? I could take guys like that on my own, even if they all came at once. And now I've got a sword, so I might as well kill them. You don't like them either, Gidwin, do you?"

It seemed the words simply weren't getting through to him.

Valery watched all of this with no particular reaction, until Harold leaned his way and murmured a quiet aside.

"Tommy's one of the squires. He's been training for years, but his confidence is out of hand."

Confidence? More like arrogance. Valery knew of Tommy. He was an Astrian, born of a commoner family.

His father was an undertaker, and Tommy, built solid from a young age, had caught the eye of Count Aethelred while the Count was making the rounds of the county, and had ended up taken on as a squire.

His exact age Valery didn't know, but in sheer size he was only a little short of Gidwin.

The trouble was that as he'd grown older, whether out of an inferiority complex or a hunger for advancement, he'd become steadily more full of himself.

In particular, whenever he crossed paths with Valery at the castle, he wouldn't address him directly, but would make a point of saying insulting things loudly enough to be heard. Things like how the whore's son stank. It was worse when there were women nearby.

Still, since they rarely crossed paths, it caused no real trouble in his life so long as he could manage to ignore it.

"Don't you all get itchy sitting around? I wish a war would hurry up and break out. Gidwin, you just go on guarding the young master. I'll be up front winning the glory. Like this. Like this!"

Tommy stood up and began swinging the sword about. At first it looked like he was swinging at the fire, but then he was swinging it around the other children, dangerously, as if pretending not to aim at them.

With the blue edge of the blade flashing past their faces, a few of the children flinched and leaned back in defensive postures.

Just as it seemed someone ought to step in and stop him, Tommy brought the blade down, without warning, on the helmet Hakon was wearing.

Clang!

"Eek!"

Hakon yelped and threw himself aside. In the process the helmet slipped askew, blinding him, and he toppled over.

"Hey!"

Gidwin's eyes flashed as he shouted.

"Hahaha! It's a joke. Just a joke."

Even as Tommy called it a joke, he showed no sign of stopping. Or perhaps he'd taken a liking to tormenting Hakon, because he struck an exaggerated pose and swung the blade at him again.

Hakon was too busy trying to dodge to do anything else, and without meaning to, he fled in Valery's direction. At that moment, a gleam came into Tommy's eyes. Valery read the ugly intent in them at once.

The sword swung in a diagonal arc toward Valery. There was no real killing intent behind it, but it was dangerous.

And that was when it happened. Something seemed to flash across Tommy's vision in an instant, and the hand that had held the sword suddenly felt empty.

His body tilted slightly off balance, and a sharp chill touched his throat. When he came back to himself, the point of the blade was at his own neck.

In the midst of his daze, he saw Valery's cold eyes. Tommy couldn't even manage to look away; he simply froze, like prey before a predator.

His body locked, he rolled his eyes and saw that his own hands were empty, and that the sword was in Valery's grip. It felt like being bewitched, or caught under some spell, and a deep fear washed over him.

Gidwin and Harold, who had been rushing over to intervene, stopped short in startled half-steps.

With the sword pressed close against Tommy's throat, Valery looked steadily at him and spoke in a low voice.

"Shut your mouth and listen to me, Tommy."

The air Valery gave off was so cold that it felt as though spring itself had been snuffed out in an instant and the world had snapped back to the dead of winter.

"I know by now that killing someone like you won't make me feel any better. So I won't kill you. But watching you behave the way you do is its own kind of torture."

Even without creasing his brow, with nothing more than something a little short of a glare, Valery's gaze was sharp as a well-honed spear, as though it could run a man clean through.

"I can't stand watching it, so quit it. Understood? Nod if you understood."

As if he'd been waiting to be told, Tommy nodded, trembling.

At that, Valery flipped the sword upward in a single spin. He caught the blade by its edge in his hand, then held the hilt out toward Tommy.

To anyone watching, it was a wildly reckless thing to do. Threatening Tommy one moment, handing the sword back the next. And holding the blade himself, no less.

"Don't disappoint me."

And yet Valery didn't seem to care which way the point or the hilt was turned.

In truth, more than any cruel or crude words, Valery's "don't disappoint me" pressed down on Tommy with overwhelming weight.

Tommy took the hilt back with trembling hands, and as if all strength had drained out of him, he let the sword hang at his side and lowered his head helplessly.

Once the matter was done, Valery turned to Harold and said,

"Thanks for the birthday. I'm going."

Then Valery slipped off his outer coat, returned it to Gidwin, who was still standing there uncertainly, and set off alone, his steps crunching through the leaves as he began to walk out of the forest.

Harold and the rest of the boys could only stare blankly at Valery's retreating back.

The silence that settled in was a long one, and it lingered for quite some time.