What kind of beings were demons?

A certain mage who had lived through the age hundreds of years ago when demons blackened half the continent and roamed unchecked had this to say about them.

“What kind? The kind you kill without questions or debate. Oh, burning them to death is best. It’s cleaner.”

Kill them without questions or debate.

That injunction was, in fact, written at the very top of the knightly precepts, imperial law, and the doctrines of the Holy Church. And with good reason. Demons were humanity’s foremost enemy.

“You’re asking whether there might be good demons too?”

“Would their name mean ‘evil fiend’ if there were?”

Arthur was the hero who had ushered in the age of humanity by sweeping away the countless demons that had blackened the continent. Merlin, who had burned innumerable demons to death at his side, gave a disbelieving laugh.

“I’ve personally burned well over ten thousand demons to death, and not one of them could be reasoned with. They’re made that way from the start,” she said.

“They repay mercy with betrayal.”

It was advice born of experience.

Najin nodded. He had never intended to question whether demons were evil in the first place. What mattered was how to fight them.

The demon knight, Berheigen.

Before pursuing him, Najin intended to prepare thoroughly. His opponent was stronger than he was. Challenging someone like that required every possible preparation.

‘According to what I found in the books...’

The books, and Merlin’s accounts.

Putting them together, Najin began writing down what he needed: holy water imbued with the Order’s blessing, a silver dagger, antidotes, and items that could increase his resistance to demonic energy...

There. The list was complete.

Now he only had to acquire everything on it.

“Well, look at you.”

Merlin’s voice echoed in his ears.

“You think you’ll find those things here? You’d have to go to the Order to get them. You can’t pick them up just anywhere.”

“Tch. I thought as much.”

“Right. And besides...” Merlin said indifferently, “you probably don’t need any of this in the first place.”

“... What do you mean?”

“What’s the most troublesome part of fighting demons? Demonic energy.”

The evil energy emitted by demons or things associated with them polluted the surrounding air and mana, eventually blackening even the environment. To ordinary living creatures, demonic energy was a deadly poison.

That held true for trained fighters as well as ordinary people.

A sufficiently accomplished fighter could resist it completely, but that required someone on the level of a Sword Master. Demonic energy continually accumulated within the body, blackening both flesh and soul.

“At first, you don’t even notice it.”

“But it keeps building up until it reaches a critical point, and then you’re past the point of no return. Unless you receive regular baptism at a church, there’s no way to resist it. Even that isn’t perfect.”

That was why humans and demons could not coexist, and why the Empire recoiled at the very thought of demons. Yet Najin tilted his head as he listened.

“Wouldn’t that make the things on this list even more necessary?”

“Honestly, this boy. Have you forgotten what you’re carrying?”

Merlin chuckled. Didn’t he possess something in an entirely different league from the Order’s blessings, holy water, and silver weapons?

“Excalibur grants its owner blessings of purification and recovery. A blessing sensitive enough to react even to alcohol... You think it wouldn’t react to demonic energy?”

“Don’t tell me...” Najin murmured.

Merlin nodded, confirming exactly what he suspected.

“You’re completely immune to demonic energy. And as long as you carry Excalibur... you’re a natural enemy of demons.”

Merlin murmured those words. Najin did not immediately understand what she meant. Certainly, King Arthur had killed plenty of demons in the storybooks... but wasn’t that simply because he was extraordinary?

Merlin could only smile bitterly at his musings.

It seemed the boy did not truly understand the weapon called Excalibur.

In the first light just before sunrise, Najin began his pursuit.

The commission included a rough sketch of the anticipated route, but it was so vague that it offered little help. It gave him only a general direction.

For Najin, however, that was enough.

While following the trail, Najin suddenly felt something stir inside him. His heart pounded, and a keen instinct moved his body of its own accord, as though responding to an evil presence. When he turned his head and instinctively headed in that direction, he found traces of the demon knight.

“Becoming Excalibur’s owner...”

As Najin began to find this unsettling, Merlin whispered in his ear.

“...means becoming its sheath.”

He became one with Excalibur and shared its properties. Merlin explained this, then let out a long breath.

“That’s why you react so sharply to evil. It’s still faint, but... tracking one bastard who’s scattering his energy openly like this should be easy enough, shouldn’t it? Just trust your instincts, as always.”

Najin nodded slowly at her words. Letting out a long breath, he hurried along the trail.

Najin ran through the forest before sunrise.

The wind was cold, and the air brushing his nose carried the smell of blood. He frowned. A foul stench—one he knew all too well.

DRIP.

His pace slowed. The sun had yet to rise, leaving the forest dim, but Najin’s eyes, accustomed to darkness, could see the scene clearly.

Trees torn out by the roots.

Bent and broken branches.

Blood spattered everywhere.

Following those signs inevitably brought the outcome of the battle into view. Najin’s slowing footsteps finally stopped. Amid the overwhelming reek of blood, he silently surveyed his surroundings.

A knight killed with his head smashed open.

A knight whose arm and leg had been torn off.

A knight with a hole through his heart.

Knights, knights, and more knights. The bodies of men who deserved to be called powerful lay scattered carelessly across the forest. Najin swung his sword to drive away the monsters feeding on them.

“...”

In silence, Najin walked among the bodies.

Broken swords and blood. Helmets without owners, crushed armor. As he passed the bodies of those who had met such wretched ends... he heard breathing.

Ragged breaths.

Breaths that sounded as though they might cease at any moment.

Passing pines drenched in blood, Najin reached the source of the sound. A knight sat with his back against a tree, clutching his abdomen.

“Hah, haah...”

Even a glance showed that the wound was fatal.

His breathing was ragged, dark red blood pooled around him, and his face was deathly pale. Najin stopped before him.

As a shadow fell over his head, the knight slowly tried to look up. Even that proved difficult; he choked and spat bloody foam.

Without a word, Najin crouched to meet his eyes so he would not have to lift his head. Then he spoke.

“Let me carry you. I’ll take you to the nearest church.”

“Thank you for the offer...” The knight smiled bitterly. “But I must decline. I know my own body. Treatment won’t save me now.”

He lifted the hand pressed against his abdomen a little, revealing a gaping hole and flesh rotted by demonic energy. It was already far too late for him to recover.

“That damned Berheigen. We used to be comrades, but he showed no affection for me. Told me to die in agony, punched a hole in my belly, and left. What an infuriating bastard.”

The knight chuckled. He feigned a casual manner, but his pale face and the cold sweat beading his forehead made it sound nothing like a joke.

“Whew...”

Catching his breath, the knight glanced over Najin’s attire.

He did not look like a knight. He looked like a mercenary or an adventurer, and the quality of his equipment suggested he was fairly well known even in Cambria.

“Have you taken a commission, by any chance?”

Najin nodded. He took the Atanga Knight Order’s commission from inside his clothes and held it before the knight’s eyes.

“I see. Atanga’s commission. You know honor, then. I commend your courage and spirit, but...”

The knight coughed up blood-tinged saliva and continued.

“He isn’t someone you can handle. Tell them his strength was assessed incorrectly. He has clearly contracted with a demon of at least middle rank... and he’s turning into one.”

He warned Najin that their information was wrong.

“Keep your distance as you pursue him, and send regular messages to the Atanga Knight Order. That will be your best course.”

He told the pursuer following in his wake what to do. As though that were still not enough, he struggled to lift a hand and pointed toward the approaching dawn. His fingertips trembled.

“He went that way. Take this.”

Murmuring those words, he handed Najin something—presumably a means of contacting Atanga. Najin silently accepted the things he offered. Only then did the knight relax his shoulders and breathe out.

As though he had done everything he needed to do.

His expression was that of a man who had finally set down his burden.

“Is there anything else you wish to leave behind?”

Najin asked the question when he noticed the knight’s breathing growing fainter. The knight merely smiled bitterly.

“A perceptive young fellow,” he murmured, barely managing to speak. “Gilbert, knight of House Trevache.”

He slowly lowered the hand plugging his abdominal wound. Gilbert had endured the agony so he could pass on information to another pursuer like himself, though he had no way of knowing when one might arrive.

... The pain of demonic energy rotting one’s flesh was more than an ordinary person could endure. Even a knight’s mental discipline had its limits.

His chances of survival were so slim as to be nonexistent. Perhaps he would have been better off slitting his own throat long ago with the dagger he carried. Yet Gilbert had struggled until the very end.

To pass information to the pursuers who would follow.

To ensure that his comrades’ deaths here were not in vain, he had endured until the last possible moment.

“Not only have I failed to bring my lord good tidings, but I must bring him bad ones instead. I can only apologize for such disloyalty.”

Gilbert smiled.

“Give my regards to my lord. And if you can, add that I remained a proud knight to the end. That should do something for my reputation, shouldn’t it?”

An idle joke.

Gilbert chuckled. With one final choking gasp, dark red blood spattered from his lips. His body gave a brief convulsion, then went limp.

He had not always lived as a proud knight.

But he had chosen to die as one, at least at the end. Thus he met his death. Najin silently reached out and closed Gilbert’s open eyes.

“...”

Najin rose.

He looked in the direction Gilbert had pointed. The sun was rising, marking the end of twilight. Watching the light fall across the forest, Najin began to walk.

A knight who had died as a knight.

Many lived as knights, but few wished to remain knights until their final moment. It was not easy to stay honorable even when cornered. All the more so in an age when the weight of the word “knight” had become so slight.

Dissolute knights.

Knights who betrayed their lords in pursuit of money.

Knights who were no more than swordsmen drunk on their own strength.

Knights without honor or pride.

Such knights abounded in this age. Most pursued tangible things like power and money rather than nebulous ideals such as honor and pride.

“It’s precisely because this is such an age...”

Najin thought it, and Merlin said it.

“...that knights like him shine.”

Those who wished to be knights despite gaining nothing from it. Those who wished to be knights at least in the final moments of their lives. Najin had seen someone like that before.

「Go, Najin.」

「Stand at the highest point and proclaim it.」

「That at the beginning of your journey stood Ivan, the Knight Who Chased the Stars.」

In the knight he had just met, Najin had glimpsed his benefactor. He still did not truly understand honor or pride, but he did understand that they deserved respect.

And because he understood that...

“Merlin,” Najin said. “The plan has changed.”

He gripped the sword at his waist tightly.

His original plan had been to watch the demon knight’s movements from a safe distance, then hold him up when the Atanga Knight Order was close to arriving.

The enemy was far too strong for him, and he had no reason to risk his life.

He had intended only to use him as an opponent to gain combat experience. But he had changed his mind. He could not help changing it. He had realized this was not something he could approach so lightly.

“I think I’ll have to take him down myself.”

Najin’s eyes had turned cold and still.

This declaration was not the boast of an arrogant genius. It carried a resolve to see it through, a determination that bordered on obsession.

“I feel like that’s the only way I’ll begin to understand honor and pride.”

Honor and pride. A knight who held them within him.

The boy admired knights. The first knight he had ever seen had planted a dream in him.

「I am Ivan.」

「Ivan, a knight of Atanga.」

The boy did not forget the pride a certain one-eyed knight had shown him. He did not forget the honor that knight had desired until the very end.

For it had been the first star the boy had ever seen.

Ivan’s eyes as he proclaimed his pride had been a star brighter than anything else. Najin wanted to understand that starlight. He had to know why Ivan had staked his life on values that seemed so hollow.

“I don’t know why...”

Najin let out a long breath. His instincts were crying out to him.

“But I feel like I’ll understand if I face that demon knight with everything I have.”

What kind of knight he wished to become.

What honor and pride were.

Paradoxically, he felt he might understand those things by facing someone who had abandoned them all.

“That’s impulsive.”

“It is. So, are you going to stop me?”

Najin asked. Merlin merely burst out laughing.

“What kind of bullshit is that?” Merlin exclaimed. “What are you waiting for? Get running!”

“I thought you’d say that.”

Najin moved forward.

He began running along the trail.

The demon knight, Berheigen.

He looked back at the sound of someone approaching. A figure was walking straight toward him without any attempt to conceal his presence. Utterly foolish. Instead of hiding and launching a surprise attack, he was showing himself openly?

Another knight?

Berheigen turned with that thought in mind. But there was no knight there. Only a young man clad not in gleaming armor engraved with a house crest, but in what looked like clothing made from monster hide.

‘A mercenary?’

Since he was passing near Cambria, someone had probably posted a commission in the city. A pointless effort. Berheigen sighed and opened his mouth.

“Hey, this is no place for some two-bit mercenary to inter—”

“Your name.”

The young man cut him off.

CLANG!

He drew his sword and pointed it at Berheigen. With the tip leveled at him, he asked what his name was.

At this gesture, as though his opponent were asking his name before a duel, Berheigen gave a disbelieving laugh.

“Berheigen.”

The demon knight gave his name.

Then the young man pointing a sword at him would have to give his own. A moment later, he opened his mouth.

“Najin.”