Chapter 65

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Ricard, Boribori, and Marie traveled across fields and valleys and through the Kaitz region. Spring had been in full bloom when they set out, but the weather had already turned muggy. Temperatures in the north were fairly steady throughout the year, but that did not mean its summers were not hot or its winters cold.

The breeze carried the rich scent of grass. Boribori sat among the flowers, eyes closed and head tilted up, sniffing the air. He was trying to identify each plant hidden within the mingled fragrances.

“Hmm... That's marigold, and this is... cornflower. That's Riki's smell, and this... gentian?”

While Boribori occupied himself with that, a boy and a girl faced off in another patch of flowers: Ricard and Marie. They seemed to be sparring, but without practice swords, they were using live blades. It looked rather dangerous.

Marie stood with her knees bent and her sword, Riki, hanging at her side. Ricard had shifted his weight slightly back, poised as though to deliver a diagonal upward cut from his lower left.

A cool, fragrant breeze passed between them, doing no more than gently stirring their hair. Neither the wind nor its scent could disturb their gazes, fixed on one another.

Deep concentration could make a person lose all sense of time. However long their standoff had lasted, Marie finally took a bold stride forward—and stopped precisely at the edge of his reach. A fraction farther and Ricard would have countered, but she was still out of range, so he did not react. His ability to judge the distance so precisely and remain still was impressive in itself.

Like someone pausing with her face just above water before holding her breath and slowly sinking beneath it, Marie began edging into Ricard's reach. She moved very, very slowly, fully aware of the tingling sensation running through her body as she entered his range. Her heart pounded, but her resolve did not waver. Her discipline was formidable too.

It was an unusual approach compared with feinting this way and that or charging in as fast as possible. Though she was the one advancing, she was actually trying to draw out her opponent's attack and counter it. With Marie taking this approach, the match became something of a contest to see who would show their hand first.

The distance kept narrowing. In a real fight to the death, this would have been extremely dangerous. That made control over the mind crucial from this point onward. No impatience. No complacency. Like the mirrored surface of a lake, one had to respond precisely to even the slightest disturbance.

Both seemed to be waiting for the other to attack. Before long, only three steps separated them. She had to swing now. Any later, and it would be too late for a counter or anything else. Marie's own anxiety sent ripples through her mirrorlike calm. She hesitated, ever so slightly.

At that moment, Ricard moved. He stepped sharply to the right, but Marie was no ordinary opponent either. Her sword flashed along a line that would block his blade's path and attack him at the same time.

WHOOSH!

The blade swished through a few blades of grass. Ricard twisted his torso farther to the right, narrowly evading it, then strode back in and seized her sword wrist.

Marie drew on her mana to resist, but Ricard knew how to turn an opponent's strength against them. In fact, there was no need: he simply tripped her. As he swept away her supporting foot, her leg flew up and her torso tipped backward. He caught her back.

Funnily enough, they ended up in what looked like a dance pose, their faces close together. Marie's heart lurched for an entirely different reason, and she lost all desire to continue the fight.

“Too close,” Ricard said with a smile.

“A-aren't you the one who's too close?”

“Hmm? Oh, that's not what I meant.”

He helped her upright and sheathed his sword. Meanwhile, Marie needlessly straightened her clothes.

“You've improved a lot. But in the end, it's about your state of mind. You did well, but you wavered at the last moment.”

Ricard had pinpointed the moment impatience and anxiety disturbed her composure. In truth, he could have subdued her long before that. This had been more of a test.

“Anyone who can control their mind to that extent might not be human.”

“Maybe not.”

“Anyway, am I really not going to beat you before you graduate?”

Ricard's graduation really was just around the corner: two or three months at the earliest, five at the latest.

“Who knows? Doesn't that depend on you, Marie?”

“But how would you feel if I actually beat you?”

“I don't think I'd feel much of anything.”

“Why? Wouldn't you be frustrated? Don't you have a competitive streak?”

“A real fight is a matter of life and death. There's no room for competitiveness. Sparring only imitates a real fight, so honestly, I don't think it helps much. It's only when people feel they're going to die that they truly look at who they are.”

Ricard spoke as he looked out across the fields. Green stretched to the horizon, covered in a profusion of red, yellow, white, and other colorful flowers. Flowers and grass swayed gently in the breeze, with butterflies and bees flitting above them. The weather was muggy, but the wind kept it from being too hot.

“But I...”

“Hmm?”

Marie seemed to have something to say, but she only hesitated, never quite managing to speak. She had something like a mission, after all. Defeat Ricard, or seduce him and marry him. Only by accomplishing one of those could she gain true freedom.

Even she could see that beating him seemed impossible. Winning his heart was the more plausible prospect. But Ricard was someone who could not believe in love. Marie knew that better than anyone.

Looking deeper, though, she felt she could not hold her head high. Whether she defeated him or won his heart, wasn't she ultimately using him as a means to gain her freedom? Did that mean she had to give up her desire to be free? It was far too great a dilemma for a young girl.

“Done sparring?” asked Boribori, who had been sitting among the flowers sniffing the air. Wearing his red cloak and carrying his sword over one shoulder, Ricard turned to Marie.

“Let's go.”

Marie let out a deep sigh and prepared to leave. Suddenly, Boribori approached her and sniffed.

“What?”

“Hmm, you smell like gentian, Marie. How strange. You had me confused for a moment.”

Ricard and Marie gave bemused chuckles. Beringen was just ahead. Sparring was nice, and so was admiring the fields in early summer, but nothing beat resting at home.

Beringen was divided into northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters. Nord settlers lived in the north, while the west housed the locals whose families had lived there for generations. Many merchants and artisans who had graduated from the academy lived in the east, and the south mostly accommodated outsiders passing through.

Enough time had passed that one might have expected them to mingle, but they had not. Living separately and respecting each other was one way of living together, to be sure. At any rate, that was how things stood. They were not enemies, but careless words or behavior in another quarter could earn someone a severe lesson.

Ricard, Boribori, and Marie were passing through the southern quarter when they spotted some people who looked about to learn one.

“Hey, you fucking bastard. If you're drunk, go sleep it off or drop dead. Why the fuck are you causing trouble?”

The speaker wore filthy, stained clothes with his sleeves rolled up. He was a big man and appeared to be the tavern keeper. The problem was the large kitchen knife in his hand. His opponent looked young; including his friends, there were three of them. One wore a deep blue jacket. The other two had taken theirs off and stood in white shirts.

“When did I cause any fucking trouble!? All I did was ask her to step outside for some air!”

“You think waving a knife around scares us!?”

“Do you own the barmaid!? Are you her pimp!? What's wrong with talking to her!?”

They looked like wild dogs barking at a single large beast. Their noisy yapping was hardly an appealing sight. Apparently, the trouble involved a waitress. Wherever one went, money and women had a way of driving men to their deaths.

In any case, the big man had a weapon more powerful than his knife, one that could settle the argument with ease.

“She's my wife, you little shits!”

That shut the yapping academy students up at once. But then they exchanged glances and began making strange, unnecessary remarks.

“She looked pretty young.”

“Did you kidnap her?”

“He must be threatening her to make her stay.”

“Right. It makes no sense.”

They seemed intent on rejecting his explanation and finding another excuse to fight. Meanwhile, people from the southern quarter were quietly gathering. Some carried clubs. This was how people learned their lesson. When the locals swarmed someone and beat them, it could even end in death.

Yet the students, whether they understood their predicament or not, made to rush the tavern keeper again. That was when Ricard stepped in.

“Hey. Enough.”

Everyone turned toward him. Several pairs of eyes ran up and down his body, then widened at the extraordinary beauty of Marie beside him. Paying that no mind, Ricard offered some advice.

“Keep that up and you really could end up dead. Go back.”

The reply was unexpected.

“And who the hell are you?”

“Every nobody's wearing a red cloak these days.”

“Can't you see this jacket? We're students of the great Beringen Academy. We've got two hundred comrades back there.”

The great Beringen what? Comrades? Unable to make sense of this bullshit, Ricard looked as though he had bitten into a bug. Of all people, these students apparently did not recognize him. He had been away for a few months, so they might have enrolled in his absence. But had newcomers always been this cocky?

“Quit it and piss off while I'm still asking nicely. Look around you.”

Only then did the students heed his advice and look around. They saw people emerging from the alleys, their manner anything but friendly. At last, fear seemed to strike them, and they looked flustered. Still, they clung to their pride until the very end.

“H-hmph! I just remembered something I have to do.”

“R-right. We've got somewhere to be.”

“Next time, we're bringing our comrades. You'd better be ready.”

With that, they hurried away. What was wrong with those idiots? Ricard apologized to the tavern keeper on their behalf.

“I'm sorry. I don't think they're truly rotten kids. I'll try to talk some sense into them.”

“Hmm...”

In fact, the tavern keeper and everyone else living here knew who Ricard was. Unlike the students, they knew very well how frightening he could be. Fortunately, once the students withdrew, the gathering residents dispersed as well.

“Is the guild war over?” the tavern keeper asked. They were not close, but they knew each other by sight.

“I hear they're negotiating peace.”

“I heard what happened at Kaitz. Everyone has.”

“I was just too busy fighting to think. Anyway, what's all this about?”

“Seems some crazy rabble-rouser named Karli became their boss while you were away. They're not threatening merchants and extorting money like they used to, but they go around in packs making trouble everywhere. They've all gotten far too full of themselves.”

Karli was Karlich's nickname, the shortened name people used for him. The locals called him their boss because they knew little about the academy and regarded it as some sort of armed organization. Neither mercenaries nor adventurers, just gangs of kids roaming around together—that was all they were to them. So they called whichever student seemed to rank first or act as leader the “boss.”

“I'm sorry. I'll look into it.”

“All right. Thanks.”

After apologizing on the students' behalf and smoothing things over, Ricard set off for the eastern quarter again, toward the guild building.

“What on earth is going on?” Boribori asked, baffled.

They had to be newcomers if they did not recognize Ricard, yet Boribori could never have dreamed of behaving that way when he had first arrived. All he had done was stay cooped up in the chicken coop, tread carefully around the others, and get beaten.

“All that talk about comrades... I suppose they're pretty united,” Marie said. She had not spent long at the academy, but she had a rough grasp of the atmosphere. The students stuck to their own cliques and were strongly individualistic, so the very word “comrade” sounded foreign there.

“Sure. Unity's a good thing...” Ricard said with something like a sigh.

Starting with him, the academy had been changing at an incredible pace. And change always came with side effects. The uniforms he had bought the students had given them pride and a sense of belonging. Karlich had done more than anyone to encourage it. But when that went too far, this was the result.

In less than two years, so much had changed, and it was changing faster still—so fast that even Ricard struggled to keep up. He could no longer tell what was going on.