SBTMK Chapter 34

"Care to step out and take a walk with me for a bit?"

Flora followed Kasin out.

He said nothing at all until they'd fully cleared the knight corps' grounds.

His face looked deep in thought about something, so Flora simply followed quietly at his side.

"Have you eaten lunch, Dame Flora?"

"...Yes, Commander."

Kasin finally spoke after a long silence. He hadn't finished it satisfactorily, of course, but she had eaten, so Flora nodded.

Kasin's face, falling silent again, looked full of fatigue. A face troubled by a great deal.

"Commander, did you not sleep properly last night?"

"A bit. There's a lot of work. Seems like nothing but serious business happening lately."

"Is it because of the Demon Hollow?"

"That's right."

Kasin nodded and looked at Flora.

"It's already been over a week since you joined the corps. Have you settled in well?"

"There's still much I lack, but I believe I'm gradually improving."

Kasin huffed a short, dry laugh at Flora's honest answer.

"Nothing difficult?"

There was plenty that was difficult. The harassment from her superiors was growing worse by the day.

All sorts of reasons, really—commoner woman, and superiors keen to set the hierarchy straight.

Flora endured it without complaint, telling herself this too would pass.

This was possible because she understood the principle of obeying one's superiors.

But the problem was that her superiors resented even that attitude of hers.

If she'd ever thrown a fit even once, it seemed they'd have taken it as license to knock her around under that pretext.

Yes. Her superiors were, without question, deliberately targeting her more than the others.

She'd shown clearly superior skill in the exam, but to her superiors, that was nothing more than a rumor.

Aside from the few Mid-rank Knights who'd personally watched as sparring opponents, everyone else had only heard about what happened in the exam secondhand.

They resented the rumor of her skill, scoffed at it—but they hadn't gone so far as to formally request a match. It seemed they worried that if they rashly stepped up to teach her a lesson and lost the match instead, it would only breed a humiliating rumor about themselves.

There were moments it was infuriating, but even so, Flora liked it here. Living again among people, belonging to some community—it gave her a strange sense of stability.

Compared to the life she'd lived before, drifting without direction, alone, this was, incomparably, happier now.

"No problems. I'm fine."

Flora answered briefly, having thought of the people harassing her.

Kasin looked down at her and pulled one corner of his mouth up.

He knew perfectly well how a recruit knight's day tended to go.

He'd also heard, through the Elite Knights and Senior Knights, that a few groups were harassing Flora, and was aware of it.

But right now, she wasn't showing the faintest hint of it. Not hiding it—she genuinely didn't look like she was struggling.

An organization's chain of command was one of the more important matters, so Kasin didn't intervene.

He couldn't offer help just because he thought someone was special or felt sympathy for them.

Special treatment from him, the Commander, could look like favoritism in his subordinates' eyes. So personal feeling had to be excluded from official matters. In the end, that approach served the harassed junior knight better.

Of course, if things crossed a line, he'd step in directly and hand down discipline—but Senior Knights with a talent for cunning weren't the type to cross that line outright.

From what he'd heard, Flora was being harassed more than the other recruits who'd joined alongside her.

The reasons were obvious enough. She was a commoner woman. And no matter how you looked at it, her skill outstripped theirs while her rank sat lower—so they wanted to flaunt their seniority over her. Petty reasons, nothing special about any of them.

This sort of thing happened every year, and this year was no different—except that this time, most of the harassment was concentrated on Flora alone.

Kasin was strict, but on the whole, a good superior. Even in the thick of his own work, he made a point of paying attention to his subordinates.

A week to a month after a recruit joined, he and the Vice-Commanders took turns interviewing them—asking whether there was anything difficult about organizational life, what should be improved, what kind of work they hoped to do going forward.

Some of the recruits from noble families, without a shred of prior social experience, would rattle off a whole list of hardships in response to Kasin's consideration.

Training was too grueling, they couldn't bear the superiors' harassment, and so on.

Watching her, though, Flora oddly didn't seem like a recruit at all. She seemed like a full-fledged knight who'd already put in something like five years.

And it wasn't the type where she knew her place and just gritted her teeth stupidly to endure.

She seemed to understand the organization's structure and simply comply with it as a matter of course.

Flora was, without question, a calm wave. But Kasin wanted to see that wave ripple.

"Good to hear. Speak up anytime, if anything's difficult."

"Yes."

"And there's a proposal I'd like to make."

At Kasin's words, Flora glanced up at her Commander.

"How would you feel about joining the demon-beast subjugation force for this mission?"

"..."

"Ah, I'm not offering you some special opportunity alone. If you've seen the board, you'll know applications are already open to Mid-rank Knights. I'm proposing it to the recruits during our interviews."

Flora, who'd looked briefly startled, felt relieved at being told it wasn't special treatment.

Kasin, watching her, huffed a short laugh.

Though she couldn't yet use magic, Flora's skill was excellent enough to slot straight into the Elite Knights without embarrassment.

Judging by how she wielded a blade without hesitation—clearly, a skill that had cut into people before, too.

It would be a waste to let her rot as a recruit.

"Only one Mid-rank Knight has applied so far. I haven't finished interviewing all the recruits, but I doubt any of them will want in. If you're chosen, you'd be assigned to support Senior Knights from the rear rather than combat."

"If it's a proposal, may I decline?"

"Of course. I won't force it. You're a recruit, after all. But I don't see a reason to pass up the opportunity."

Flora looked up at Kasin again.

"I only just joined. If I'm already sent on a mission this early, won't there be a lot of backlash within the—"

"You even care about that? Impressive."

"..."

"But I'd guess the reaction splits one of two ways. Either they'll like it, or they'll worry. The first kind will laugh at you. Say you're walking straight into a death sentence on your own two feet."

Come to think of it, Kasin's words seemed right, and Flora laughed faintly too.

Kasin added on shortly after.

"You said you wanted to become a knight loyal to the empire, who protects the weak and never abandons justice."

"..."

"And I said I'd guide you. So if you won't go on your own, I'd like to push you into it a little. What do you say?"

Her calm eyes rippled, faintly, at last.

Simen makes it a habit to receive a brief summary of the day's council meetings from his Chief Secretary, Kadiok, once a day, along with any agenda documents pertaining to them.

That was Emperor Simen's official schedule.

"Your Majesty, when do you plan to appear in your office?"

"Every day."

"At night, Your Majesty?"

"You have no idea how well work gets done at night. There's nothing else in the world quite that quiet. No one comes barging in to interrupt, either."

"..."

"Doesn't it feel like you actually get to be emperor, using the whole office to yourself all day? Isn't that nice?"

Kadiok's expression said are you even asking me that seriously, but in the end, he didn't say it out loud.

"If you're that lonely, come in at night yourself, then."

Simen huffed a short laugh and got up from his seat.

Having failed to persuade the emperor yet again today, Kadiok saw him off and was left alone in the office.

As Simen stepped out of the office, the guards who'd been standing nearby fell in beside him.

At night, it was usually Erne alone at his side, with the rest hidden like shadows, but during the day, plenty of knights guarded him openly, even within the castle.

Setting aside the occasions when he had to move in secret, every official movement—the kind nobles would hear about quickly—went exactly like this.

The environment Simen had grown up in had been like this. An official schedule could never afford to be comfortable.

That was because minor assassination attempts and poisoning attempts had occurred steadily and without letup.

The reason he all but shut himself away and worked at night was, in part, a result of exactly that.

He was also exhausted by meetings with nobles who thought of nothing but stuffing their own pockets by any means necessary.

Working at night was the ideal way to avoid running into them.

The nobles preferred it that way too. It let them slip their own agendas onto the agenda or play games with the numbers as they pleased.

The nobles didn't seem to think, to begin with, that Simen did his work properly at all.

He often made a show of sleeping or idling by day, exactly as they'd want him to—idiots who knew jack and thought it was everything, easily fooled.

Simen only sat in on meetings when he judged the matter genuinely important; the smaller things he received as documents, giving his approval or refusal through those instead.

Sharpening his nerves and arguing over empty theory at every turn wasn't to his taste.

He could only take one thing, and in exchange, offer up something modest, watching all the while for his real opening.