A bargain with a devil. Now an established idiom, the expression means the following:

“Inviting greater ruin in order to escape an immediate danger.”

The reason it came to be used that way was simple. That was precisely what bargaining with a devil entailed. Without exception, everyone who made such a bargain met with ruin. Humanity’s long history proved it. Even in ancient times that predated recorded history, humans had bargained with devils—and met their destruction.

And yet humanity still bargained with devils.

Even when the law forbade it, when countless stars warned against it, when those who made such bargains were brutally executed and their horrific ends widely publicized, someone, somewhere, would inevitably bargain with a devil. There was no end to them.

The reason for that was simple as well.

Humans lived in the present, not the future. Escaping the danger immediately before them mattered more than some future ruin whose arrival they could not predict. For the sake of the present, they could readily throw away their future.

Najin looked at the Helmeted Knight.

He still could not read his expression. Even if he could, he would not have tried. Najin asked in a light tone.

“If you bargained with a Demon King, a king among devils, the price must have been considerable.”

“It was.”

“Have you paid it already?”

“Half of it. I’m still paying the other half.”

“Have you gained anything from it?”

“Not yet.”

Their exchange was cryptic.

Najin did not ask for details.

“Are you disappointed?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t bargaining with a devil disqualify me as a knight? Surely Knight King Arthur said that a knight should kill a devil, never compromise with one.”

“He also said that the final sentence mattered more than all the others.”

Najin spoke that final sentence.

“Are you a knight?”

“No. To my shame.”

“At the very least, do you wish to be one?”

“I’m striving to be.”

“That’s enough.”

With that, Najin smiled.

It was a smile that left anyone who saw it feeling refreshed. At first glance, it seemed almost thoughtless. But the Helmeted Knight knew that was not what it meant.

The boy before him was not thoughtless. Quite the opposite. He must have reached his answer after ample thought, deliberation, and soul-searching.

And that was his answer.

‘That’s enough. Nothing else matters.’

Whether you bargained with a devil, knelt before one, or finally groveled and begged for your life, the circumstances did not matter. Why did they not matter?

‘Because you wish to be a knight.’

Because that was the person he had seen him be.

For some reason, those words made the Helmeted Knight’s armor feel lighter. The armor that had always felt so heavy, the helmet that weighed down his head—for this moment, they felt light. And so the laugh that escaped his lips could be light as well.

“Well, now.”

The Helmeted Knight scratched his helmet.

“I thought it was your good fortune that an inexperienced boy like you met me—that the first hunter you encountered in this godforsaken land was someone like me... But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.”

He let out a disbelieving laugh.

“It was the other way around.”

“The other way around,” he murmured. After standing there chuckling, the Helmeted Knight let out a long breath. He seemed to have made up his mind.

“I can’t let the first good fortune to come my way in a hundred and fifty years slip away. Yes, it’s a little late, but I’ve finally decided.”

“Decided what?”

“To take you as my pupil. Didn’t you say in front of Bernstein that I was your master? A knight must not speak falsehoods. I’ll make that declaration true.”

The Helmeted Knight gave him a look. Understanding it, Najin went down on one knee before him and bowed his head. The knight took the sword from his waist. The chain-bound blade remained sheathed, but that hardly mattered now.

The Helmeted Knight’s sword lightly touched Najin’s shoulder.

“From this day forward, you are my pupil. An apprentice knight, and my squire as well.”

“Unfortunately, you would be my fourth teacher and the second person I serve. Would that be all right?”

“Now, now. That was on the continent, wasn’t it? These are the Outer Lands. On the continent, they describe this place as the afterlife or the world beyond, don’t they? It’s an entirely different world, which means you ought to start that count over, wouldn’t you say?”

Najin laughed in disbelief.

“That’s a fair point.”

“Good. Then, speaking as your master...”

He repeatedly clenched and unclenched his hand, as though checking something.

At last, apparently satisfied with the check, he spoke.

“Thirty days. Give me thirty days. Within that time, I’ll teach you all of my three hundred years.”

2.

Thirty days. The Helmeted Knight had promised Najin thirty days, declaring that he would teach him everything from his three hundred years within that time.

Geniuses might reduce another person’s lifetime to a single moment, but that only applied when they were learning from an ordinary person. Naturally, the Helmeted Knight was far from ordinary. He was, in fact, closer to Najin.

The Empire’s hero, the empire’s greatest swordsman.

A Sword Master who had attained transcendence.

The swordsman who had created the original form of imperial swordsmanship.

That alone was what the scattered fragments of information about the Helmeted Knight amounted to. Even those fragments left no room to doubt how exceptional a warrior he had been. The title of the empire’s greatest swordsman would hardly be given to just anyone.

Even among those called geniuses, only a tiny few attained transcendence. The experience accumulated over three hundred years by a genius exceptional enough to belong to that tiny few... was indeed not something even Najin could learn easily.

“Guh!”

“Not like that. Put strength into it! Don’t waver. Usually, it’s right to take a stance that lets you retreat at any moment and flow into your next attack. But not in this case. Think of finishing it in a single blow.”

After accepting Najin as his pupil, the Helmeted Knight changed the way he taught. He took up his sword and sparred with Najin himself, roughly correcting his stance. At times, he even struck Najin’s body with the sword.

“The first strike of Atanga’s swordsmanship, the style you learned, is excellent. But the second strike that follows it is abysmal. What good is breaking your enemy’s technique if your follow-up attack is so lackluster? Don’t rely on sword aura. Look carefully at the direction your sword travels.”

The Helmeted Knight corrected the flaws in Najin’s stance, filled in what was lacking, and pointed him toward something better—with the very sword in his hand. He no longer taught Najin with some old, rusty sword picked up at random, but with the sword that had been fastened at his waist.

“You’ve learned a variety of sword styles. That’s not bad. The more styles you can wield, the more situations you can handle. But simply knowing many things and using what you know are different matters. I’ll teach you how to use them.”

The chain-bound blade still remained sheathed.

But little by little, the Helmeted Knight began to swing it.

“Yes. That’s it. That’s the foundation of my swordsmanship. What do you think? Pretty good, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t this just a sword style that only works if the person using it is monstrously strong? Something about it seems...”

“Now, now! It doesn’t only work if you’re monstrously strong. Learning it makes you monstrously strong. Listen here, you little punk. With this swordsmanship, I split a devil that had gobbled up six stars clean in half, and stormed the Sky-Drifting Star’s palace to steal its liquor!”

“Why would you steal its liquor?”

“It makes some pretty good stuff.”

“...”

A day passed, then two, then a week.

As time passed, Najin’s sword grew sharper. The Helmeted Knight began finding less to correct. Watching Najin swing his sword, he would marvel or burst into laughter.

“You’re absolutely insane. This isn’t supposed to be so easy to learn. What does that make me if you gobble up my three hundred years just like that?”

Despite his words, the Helmeted Knight showed no sign of displeasure. On the contrary, he was delighted. The more Najin caught up, the more he taught him, and the faster he taught.

“Why do you think a transcendent being’s swordsmanship differs from an ordinary person’s? Why is a Sword Expert’s swordsmanship different from a Sword Seeker’s? They can swing the same sword and produce different results. Sword aura is what makes that difference.”

The Helmeted Knight swung his sword.

“Depending on how you release your sword aura, the same technique can take hundreds of different forms. And in my swordsmanship... you compress the aura to its limit. Just as you did against Bernstein.”

At some point, the chains binding his sword and scabbard began to rattle. The blade remained sheathed, but it trembled inside its scabbard as though it might come free at any moment.

“I’ll show you. Watch, and try it yourself.”

“I keep telling you, I don’t understand it even when I watch!”

“Then watch more carefully.”

“This is seriously driving me crazy.”

“Who said learning a Sword Master’s swordsmanship would be easy?”

Another week passed.

It was around the fourteenth day of learning swordsmanship from the Helmeted Knight that changes began to appear in him.

3.

On the fourteenth day.

“...”

The Helmeted Knight stopped in the middle of a lesson and stared blankly into space. Even when Najin spoke to him, he did not respond. Only after a little time had passed did he resume, asking, “Where was I?”

At first, Najin did not think much of it.

But when it happened more and more often, until he began stopping several times a day, Najin could no longer brush it aside.

The Helmeted Knight, too, noticed the strange change in his body, but said nothing about it. Najin did not go out of his way to ask, either.

Twenty days had passed.

Najin now spent more time putting what the Helmeted Knight had taught him into practice than learning anything new. Against one powerful Lost, he demonstrated the knight’s swordsmanship. It was a formidable foe, but after a hard fight, Najin brought it down.

It had possessed roughly four stars in life.

Standing before its corpse, Najin looked at the Helmeted Knight and asked how his swordsmanship had been, and whether there was anything he should correct. Midway through his answer, the knight stopped speaking. Silent, he approached Najin.

No—he walked past him.

He stood before the Lost Najin had slain and reached toward its crumbling corpse. Though Najin spoke to him, the Helmeted Knight did not answer. It was as if something had bewitched him.

“... Ah.”

Belatedly, a brief shudder ran through him.

He seized his outstretched right hand with his left and drew a sharp, ragged breath. Then he turned toward Najin, as though checking how Najin was looking at him. His helmet concealed his expression, but Najin could tell that he was afraid.

Of what? Of what he had done without realizing it? Or of the possibility that his pupil might despise him for it?

It seemed to be both.

Najin was startled as well, but did not let it show. He looked at the Helmeted Knight no differently than usual and said with a sly grin, “Was my swordsmanship so excellent that you ran out of criticism halfway through? You can’t even find anything to nitpick now, can you?”

“... Hah.”

The Helmeted Knight gave a hollow laugh and straightened up.

“Yes. Excellent. So when exactly do you intend to learn my ultimate technique? That’s the only thing left.”

“Like I keep saying, I don’t understand it even when I watch.”

It would have been good if that had been the only incident, but similar things happened again and again.

The Helmeted Knight would stop before the Lost Najin slew, or before beasts imbued with starlight. Each time, he would grip the military banners wrapped around his body hard and come back to his senses.

He spent more time in silence, too. More and more often, he would stare blankly into space before belatedly coming to his senses.

Twenty-six days.

With four days remaining of the time the Helmeted Knight had promised, Najin had learned most of his swordsmanship. Yet there was still one technique he could not get a feel for—the one the knight called his ultimate technique.

A technique containing the essence of three hundred years.

That alone left Najin at a loss as to how to imitate it, or how to learn it.

“Najin.”

On the twenty-seventh day, the Helmeted Knight suddenly pointed at the spear Najin carried.

“That oddly shaped spear.”

“You mean the cross-star spear?”

“Yes. The owner of that spear—what was his name?”

“... Pardon?”

This time, even Najin could not hide his dismay. Until now, whenever the Helmeted Knight acted strangely, Najin had smoothed things over with a bit of banter or a joke... But this time, he could not.

“Krünbel, the Knight of Silence.”

“Ah, yes. That’s right. That was it.”

“...”

“Yes. I remember. The Order of the Golden Horn. And this horned helmet is called Horned Helm. And I...”

The Helmeted Knight stopped speaking.

He stared into space, then murmured blankly.

“What was I?”