Mushoku Tensei Redundancy (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 5.2

Chapter 2:

Dohga the Gatekeeper

IN THE KINGDOM of Asura, there were seven warriors known as the Seven Knights of Asura. They swore absolute loyalty to Ariel Anemoi Asura. Their leader was Knight Banneret Luke Notos Greyrat—the Royal Dagger.

The Three Knights of the Right presided over offense. They were Sandor von Grandeur, the Royal Greatsword; Oswald Euros Greyrat, the Royal Halberd; and Ghislaine Dedoldia, the Royal Guard Dog.

The Three Knights of the Left presided over defense. They were Dohga, the Royal Gatekeeper; Sylvester Ifrit, the Royal Fortress; and Isolde Cluel, the Royal Shield.

Of these seven, the backgrounds and origins of some were widely known, but half of them had been scouted especially by Ariel and Luke. They were a motley bunch, comprising commoners, nobles of all ranks, and a half-human-half-immortal demon. What they all shared was their unswerving loyalty to Ariel. While Isolde suffers for her misunderstanding of what Ariel meant by “slight” when she spoke of “difficult proclivities,” let us turn to the story of another of these knights.

***

He was born in a little village in the Donati Region of Asura. A little slow at times, the other children looked down on him. But he was a healthy child, sturdily built, and never got sick. His father was one of the few soldiers who protected the village and was seldom home. He hardly ever had a day off, and it wasn’t unusual for him to be out all night. When the boy was five, his little sister was born. She was a sweet girl, just like their mother. But their mother’s recovery after the birth went poorly, and she died.

The boy cried. He hadn’t so much as whimpered when his friends punched him or when a mosquito stung him, but now he wailed. 

As he wept, his father told him, “It’s all right to cry now. But when you’re done, you are to protect your sister for me.”

The boy looked up at his father, who was holding his little sister, and nodded over and over again. From that day on, the boy stopped crying. He faithfully did as his father had told him—he would protect his little sister.

He decided that the way to do this was to guard the entrance to the house. He took the axe they used for firewood in hand and stood outside the door all day long. It was only when his sister started crying that he ran back inside to tend to her.

His friends laughed at him when they saw him. “What’re you doing? Go watch her inside.”

The adults of the village said, “Why don’t we take her and watch her? We have lots of children already. Another one won’t be any trouble.”

But the boy dug in his heels and refused to listen. He learned how to look after a nursing infant, and he would not leave the care of his sister to anyone else. 

During this time, something unusual happened in the village. One night, all the hapless animals inside one of the barns were devoured. From the footprints, the villagers guessed it was a wolf. The soldiers ran around the village telling the villagers they must bolt their doors and not open them under any circumstances.

The next day, the animal struck a house. Somehow, the wolf had slipped inside under cover of darkness and snapped a child’s neck in its jaws, killing them instantly, before escaping through a window. When the family woke up in the morning, none of them knew what had happened. They followed the trail of blood until, just outside the village, they found the baby’s clothing lying in a pool of blood. It drove them half-mad. 

As more incidents followed, the soldiers realized that their guess had been wrong. The creature stalking the village was not a wolf—it was a monster. It was small, no bigger than an ordinary wolf, but a vicious monster nonetheless.

They were right: it had the head of a wolf and the hind legs of a wolf, but monkey arms sprouted from its shoulders. It could walk on two legs when it chose, and it climbed trees. Though it was only the size of a large dog, its head was too large for its body. It was a clever mutant that had learned the taste of human flesh. 

As though it relished the villagers’ terror, it lurked in another household’s wheatfield for a day to select its next target. It chose its next house because the adult did not come home at night. The father went hunting for the monster elsewhere, leaving his two children helpless. Licking its chops, the monster used its monkey arms to climb up on the roof, then slipped down the chimney.

The next day dawned. When his nighttime patrol was over, the boy’s father went back to his house. The first thing that met his eyes was a pool of blood.

“No,” he gasped. His face pale, he looked around the house and immediately saw the mangled corpse on the floor. It was the monster, its head split in two. Standing between it and his daughter, who was sleeping peacefully in her bed, was his son. The boy clutched the firewood axe with his legs planted firmly apart, a ferocious look on his face. It had been a desperate battle. The boy was covered in blood, and his arm was broken, but the children were alive. The monster had been small, yes, but it was still the size of a wolf—in other words, twice the boy’s size. The child had beaten the monster to death with a blunt firewood axe to protect his sister. 

For the boy, who would later become North Emperor Dohga, this was his first battle.

Dohga was a gatekeeper all his life. 

When he was ten, he guarded the gate to the village. Just before the displacement incident, there was a great rampage of monsters. They sprang up out of all the forests throughout the kingdom and many villages were swept up in the destruction. Some were even swallowed in the stampede. 

Dohga’s village was attacked as well, but Dohga took up his woodcutter’s axe with undaunted valor, and he drove them off. It was said that he slew anywhere between fifty and a hundred of them. However, despite the great mound of monster corpses Dohga created, his father was killed in the fighting. Dohga stood before his father’s lifeless body, stunned. A knight who saw him fight recommended that Dohga go join the guard of the kingdom’s capital. Dohga was reluctant, saying he was protecting his little sister.

This was what the knight told him: “Listen well, boy. We leave our families to ride out to all corners of the kingdom, protecting its villages. When the kingdom is safe, our families can live in peace. Protecting the kingdom means protecting your family as well.”

Dohga was not bright, and at the time, he did not understand what the knight was saying. In the end, it was money that convinced him. With his father dead, he needed a way to make ends meet. He was told that if he went to the capital, he could earn enough for him and his sister to live on, so that decided that. Dohga became a soldier of the royal capital. 

He was posted to a little gate that separated the slums from the lower-class citizens’ district. The gate existed as a bottleneck for when the people of the slums grew unruly and stormed the lower-class district. It was forbidden for any to pass at night, but otherwise, it had no special importance. It was a suitable post for an uneducated boy from the countryside. 

The room he and his sister were given to live in was small but serviceable. From there, he went to work at the barracks. He stood at the gate from morning to night, and sometimes even the whole night that followed. 

Although slow, Dohga was also strangely endearing. At first, some of the other soldiers resented that, at barely ten, he was serving with them. But his innocent nature and steadfast dedication to his sister melted the hearts of his comrades, and before his first year was up, they had recognized him as one of their own.

He began his second year. 

One night, a woman came running to Dohga’s gate. She threw herself on him, begging for his help. When Dohga hesitated, a group of hard-faced men appeared and yelled at him, “Hand over the girl!”

Dohga was confused. He didn’t know what to do. If only Hans, who was supposed to be on duty with Dohga, hadn’t been napping, he might have decided for them.

When the woman saw Dohga’s confusion, she tried to dash away through the gate. Dohga immediately grabbed her collar and pulled her back. He had been told that no one was to pass the gate at night. 

In that moment, the men, sensing that the woman was going to get away, attacked. Dohga swung his battle axe—a farewell gift from the village smith when he had become a soldier. He killed all the men. At the sight of Dohga standing there, drenched in blood, the woman wet herself, then sunk down on all fours. 

Hans came running, drawn by the noise. He stopped short at the sight of the carnage at the gate. This, he thought, was going to be bad. Dohga had committed an act of indiscriminate murder. Hans had been asleep; the blame would fall on him, too. His face gray, he went to check the corpses, then he realized he knew these faces. It was the gang of thieves who had been running wild through the lower-class district. This lot had been giving the guard a lot of trouble because the knights wouldn’t bother with this lowly district. 

And Dohga had wiped them all out single-handedly.

Dohga was promoted. He went from being the soldier who guarded the gate between the lower-class district and the slum to the soldier who guarded the gate between the middle-class district and the lower-class district. For some reason, Hans went with him. 

Dohga stayed at that gate for some time. Some days it rained, some days a gale blew through, but he stood watch through it all. Even after he came of age, he stuck to it. He was slow, so Hans helped him. 

Along the way, Hans came to understand Dohga better than anyone. Dohga’s sister grew up into a beautiful young woman, and she and Hans were married. Perhaps Hans had been eyeing his sister all along, but that didn’t matter to Dohga—he knew that while Hans might nap on the job, he wasn’t a bad sort. He swore to Saint Millis in front of Dohga that he would make his sister happy.

But then Dohga found himself alone. With his sister married, he’d fulfilled his father’s instructions through to the end. He no longer needed to guard any gate. 

Yet Dohga stayed at his post.

Some days it rained, some days a gale blew through, but he guarded the gate.

On one such day, the city was rocked by a great shock: Ariel Anemoi Asura had announced her coronation. A coronation ceremony was a celebration that lasted for days. The soldiers would get a pay raise for the duration as well as free food. Dohga’s comrades were delighted; Hans even did a little dance.

This also meant that they would have to do more work. Security needed to be tightened not only in the middle-class district, but throughout the entire city. Temporary guards were recruited from among the city folk, while Dohga and the others who were already soldiers were assigned to guard more important locations. Dohga and Hans did their job with gusto, thinking they would buy Dohga’s little sister something nice with their extra wages. 

One day, around halfway through the coronation, Dohga found himself guarding the servants’ entrance to the palace. Few people passed there, but every now and then, a servant with a pass would come through. Hans was not with him. Dohga guarded this gate together with several other soldiers. 

A man came along. He wore shabby old armor and carried a long staff.

“I couldn’t convince you to let me pass, could I? I seek an audience with Queen Ariel.”

Of course the guard on the gate turned him away. “None may pass this gate without permission! Produce your pass!”

“I do not have a pass. I would like to beg an audience with the queen.”

“No pass, no passage. Away with you!”

“I have no choice, then. I’m glad I came to this gate. I thought I might have to cast a pall on Her Majesty’s glorious occasion,” the man said. He tried to force his way through the gate. His staff moved like magic. In an instant, the other gatekeepers were knocked to the ground.

But not Dohga. No matter how many times the man drove the butt of his staff into Dohga’s vital spots, he remained standing. Dohga swung his axe at the man but couldn’t touch him. Dohga had never before missed a target. He went on attacking doggedly.

The man was delighted. “Marvelous! I didn’t think to find a man like you hidden away in a place like this. All right. Out of respect for your strength, I will give up on getting through this gate. I beg your pardon. As a token of my apology, how about becoming my apprentice? You’ve got talent!”

Dohga had no idea what the man was talking about, but the man seemed to have given up on getting through the gate. But the moment he relaxed, he passed out. He didn’t even drop; he was out cold and still standing. When he woke with a start, the man was still there. He was holding Dohga’s axe and appeared to be guarding the gate—except that he was surrounded by a throng of soldiers.

“Good morning, kid! I’ve been guarding the gate for you!”

That was how Dohga met Sandor—otherwise known as Alex Rybak, North God Kalman II.

The day that Dohga became Sandor’s apprentice, he went home and half-collapsed into bed. There had been a healing magician among the soldiers who had come running, so none of the damage was permanent. His battle with North God Kalman had drained every drop of his bottomless reserves of strength. For the first time in his life, he fell asleep out of exhaustion. He slept for two days, then woke up. At his bedside was his sister, tear streaks on her face, and Hans, who looked relieved. Also, there was Sandor, looking inappropriately cheerful.

“Good morning, apprentice! Come with me.” In a terrific display of strength, Sandor pulled Dohga to his feet, then got him into his armor and made to lead him off somewhere. Dohga, not understanding, looked to Hans for help.

“Sorry, Dohga. I don’t really know what’s going on either, but I think you’re being honored. So look, go along with him for now, eh? You do your best, and don’t be rude.”

“Yes,” his sister added. “Brother, I… Please do your best.” 

Dohga, not following Hans’s train of thought at all, looked around in confusion, but he couldn’t fight Sandor’s strength. And so, they set off for the gate he had guarded the other day. When they arrived, Sandor pulled out a pass with a flourish to let them through. Just like that, they were inside the palace. Dohga followed behind Sandor, amazed by his first glimpse of the glittering halls. Before he knew it, there was a pretty woman with blonde hair in front of him.

“This is the boy?”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

“I wish to speak to him a little.”

Sandor gave Dohga a shove in the back, so that he was standing directly in front of the woman. She was divinely beautiful.

“I am Ariel Anemoi Asura. And you are?”

Dohga did not know that name. Though he was a city soldier, he was unaware of the queen. Naturally, he had never seen her either. Before he knew it, Dohga found himself kneeling. For some reason he felt like he ought to.

“I-I’m…Dohga.”

“Why did you become a soldier?”

“D-Dad…said protect…little sister, so…” 

Dohga struggled with speaking. He had never been eloquent enough to recount his life to anyone, but Ariel readily accepted what he said.

“To protect your sister? Very admirable.”

“B-but…now Hans protects…my sister, I mean, they’re together now…um…”

At a glance from Ariel, the knight beside him supplied, “His younger sister married a soldier named Hans.” Dohga didn’t know this, but the knight was Luke. 

“So I…don’t really have to protect…her anymore…” 

Ariel smiled at Dohga’s slightly dejected expression. “You are wrong, Dohga,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You do still have to protect her.”

“Wh-what do you…mean?”

“Hans is your younger brother now. That means that you have to protect both of them. You have to do twice the work.”

That was a shock to Dohga. He hadn’t thought about it like that. She was right, though. Hans, who said he would protect Dohga’s sister, had started to call him brother. Dohga was his older brother. He had to protect his little sister, so obviously, he had to protect his little brother too.

“O-oh. I…need to protect them more?”

“That’s right. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you might not be able to protect either of them.”

“Huh?! Wh-why?”

“You are strong, but your reach is short. It may be that the two of them will run into danger somewhere you cannot help them.”

Dohga looked at the palms of his hands. He remembered how his father had died. He had been so close, and yet a monster had killed him when Dohga wasn’t looking.

“Th-then…what should I…do?”

“Protect me.”

“Huh?”

“I serve the kingdom. I make it better. By protecting me, you will be protecting the kingdom, and by protecting the kingdom, you will be protecting your brother and sister.”

Dohga didn’t understand. What did protecting this woman in front of him have to do with protecting Hans and his sister? He was completely lost. But Ariel was serious. He remembered that someone else had told him something similar—the knight who had given him a letter of recommendation to join the city guard.

Listen well, boy. We leave our families to ride out to all corners of the kingdom, protecting its villages. When the kingdom is safe, our families can live in peace. Protecting the kingdom means protecting your family as well.

At the time, he hadn’t known what he was being told. It was money that had spurred him into action. Now, he felt like he understood. After all, even when he was protecting a totally different place, his sister and Hans lived happily.

“Dohga. Will you swear loyalty to me? Will you protect me and, by extension, the kingdom?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Very well, Dohga, I name you a knight.” On that day, Dohga became one of the Seven Knights of Asura.

Since then, Dohga had guarded the final gate—the door to the royal chambers. Sometimes, on Ariel’s orders, he went other places. For a few hours each day, he practiced under Sandor’s tutelage a short distance from Ariel’s chambers. 

On the one day each month he had leave, he went to eat dinner with his sister and Hans. When Dohga wasn’t there, someone else guarded the royal chambers in his place. Usually, it was Isolde Cluel, the Royal Shield, but that was not the case in the beginning. 

After being made a knight and given his shining gold armor, he had stubbornly refused to budge from in front of his gate. Now that he had made up his mind to protect it, he could not hand it off to anyone who’d do the job half-heartedly. For his first month, he would not surrender his post to anyone except Sandor. If Ariel had not ordered him to rest, he would have stayed on guard for days without food or drink or sleep. He performed body searches on everyone who approached the royal chambers without distinguishing between men and women. He would confiscate even the tiniest fork. 

It was around this time that a new member joined the Seven Knights of Asura—Isolde Cluel, the Royal Shield. She had her job as sword instructor, but back then, before Ghislaine joined them, she was the only woman among the Seven Knights. It was decided that she was the ideal choice for the queen’s personal protection.

One day, it was decided that Sandor would travel around the Asura Kingdom to put together the Golden Knights. Without Sandor, there was no one who could fill in for Dohga. If he stood there for a full month, he would collapse. So Sandor set up a match between him and Isolde. 

At that time, Sandor had Dohga introduce himself as “North King.” He had only just begun his training, but he was extremely skilled. Even so, Isolde wiped the floor with him. She moved like the wind, turning aside his blows from his battle axe, then hammering him with one counterattack after another until she brought him down. If they had been using real blades and fighting to kill, Isolde would have slain Dohga in an instant. 

Dohga had an inexhaustible supply of strength, but he lost without laying so much as a finger on her. This woman, slender as a flower, had turned aside the blows of an axe broader than she was, then stung like a delicate thorn. After taking strike after strike, Dohga accepted that this was a person worthy of guarding the door in his stead.

He also understood something: the woman was a delicate and beautiful flower, untouchable to the likes of him. Dohga was in love.

***

“You seem down lately…”

Dohga was at dinner with his sister and her husband. The food on the table was simple, but there was enough of it to fill even Dohga’s giant belly. On the other side of the table sat his sister and Hans, and beside Hans, their lovely daughter.

Dohga, a brimming tankard of wine in one hand, looked blankly at Hans.

“Are you not feeling well?”

“Wh-why?” Dohga said as he tried to mask his inner turmoil. 

Hans pointed at the food. “You’ve barely eaten.”

Dohga looked. It was true; he’d hardly made a dent in the food. He loved his sister’s cooking. Usually, Dohga gulped down his food in silence, happily stuffing his cheeks until he’d polished everything off. The same went for wine, which was his favorite. It was only drunk on celebratory occasions, but when they had it, he drank like a fish. Hans kept an entire barrel on hand for those occasions. Yet for some reason, Dohga had only eaten half his food, and he only sipped at his wine. Something was wrong. 

“If you don’t feel well, you get one of the palace healing magicians to look at you, all right? They’d do that for you, what with you being a knight now, yeah? Though I have to say, you look healthy enough.”

Dohga tilted his head, face blank. He didn’t realize there was anything unusual about himself. 

“If you’re worn out, why not ask for a few more days off? I know you’re a hard worker and you’ve got an honorable job in guarding Her Majesty. If you push yourself too hard and collapse, then where will you be? Not that I could imagine you collapsing.”

“Mm.” Dohga nodded and started to eat. Something was definitely off. The food tasted how it always did—delicious. It just felt wrong as he swallowed it. Usually, it was more munching and gulping and yelling, “Bring out the next dish!” 

Not today. 

Every time he swallowed, his stomach rejected it. It was like the feeling of being full, but more unpleasant. The wine was strange too—it was tasteless. This had never happened to him before. Perhaps he really was sick or, like Hans said, worn out.

“Hey now, what’s the story? Tell us.” When Dohga stayed silent, Hans pressed further. “Brother… Dohga. Ever since we were guards down in the lower city, you’ve always had my back. If you can’t tell me your troubles, I won’t be able to show my face anywhere—not even to Saint Millis.”

“Mm. I don’t…know either.”

“Something must’ve happened recently at the palace. Anything. Just try to talk,” Hans said with a serious look. 

Dohga looked up. Then, just as Hans had said, he went through his memories and, bit by bit, began to talk them through. There was the cat that had gotten lost inside while he was watching the final gate. He had given it some of his lunch, and it had started coming by a lot, which made him happy. How when he was walking through the town in his armor, a young soldier flagged him down to say, “I respect you,” which had made him happy. Isolde had come by while he was guarding the final gate, then thanked him when he took a flower petal from her hair and gave it to her, which had made him happy. When Sandor had taught him a new technique, he’d said, “You really have talent,” which had made him happy. While he was walking around the hospital, a guard shared a rumor with him that “Isolde might get married.” That didn’t make him happy. How at a party for the guards, Isolde had come in a dress and been the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, which had made him happy. He had seen her dancing with men he didn’t know, which hadn’t made him happy. How the noble girls had been spreading groundless rumors about Isolde, which had made him unhappy. How he had seen Isolde walking together with a handsome man, which had hurt his heart. How Isolde—

“That’s enough. I understand. I understand perfectly,” Hans said, cutting Dohga off. He had the general idea now. “You’re in love with this Isolde, eh?”

Dohga’s cheeks burned. He didn’t know how Hans had worked it out from what he’d said, but he’d hit the nail on the head.

“You heard that Isolde’s going to get married, then you saw things that seemed to give weight to it, and it gave you a shock.”

After a long pause, Dohga mumbled, “Mm.” The gloom hanging over him was palpable.

Hans was right. His big brother, who he’d thought was oblivious to matters of the heart, was in love.

A memory came back to Hans of his own first love. She was the daughter of the greengrocer next door to his family home. Though they were five years apart in age, they were childhood friends, and she had taken care of him ever since he was small. She was kind, reliable, and pretty, and he fell in love with her at only five years old. He’d dreamed of marrying her. When he was older, he thought, he would enlist as a soldier. Once he had a stable income, he would ask for her hand in marriage.

In the summer of his twelfth year, she married the butcher’s son and took up his family trade. Hans knew her husband, who had already been old in his earliest memories. He would have been about five years older than her. Come to think of it, that meant he couldn’t have been that old. 

At first, Hans was in denial. The man was well built, but he definitely wasn’t handsome. Hans was sure that she hadn’t really wanted to get married, and that one day, he would reclaim her. But a year later, when he saw her happily snuggled up in her husband’s arms, her belly huge, it finally hit him. He had cried into his pillow. Maybe if he’d told her how he felt earlier, it would all have been different.

Not that he was unhappy now, of course. If he had married the greengrocer’s daughter, he couldn’t have married Dohga’s little sister. She wasn’t like Dohga at all—she was slight and sweet and steadfast. The fruit of their love was now shoveling down food in Dohga’s place. She was a robust child, and bright—not like Hans. Most of all, she was cute as a button. Hans was confident there could be no one as happy as him, but it had come on the tail of bitter heartbreak.

Thanks to that experience, he sprang into action as soon as he realized how he felt about Dohga’s sister. She might have thought him a little frivolous at first, but Hans had always been a gentleman with her. He worked harder than ever at his job as gatekeeper. Since he told her that he loved her, he hadn’t slept with a prostitute once. As a result, he had won out over no small number of rivals to claim the happiness he had now. 

That was why Hans said, “Ask Isolde to marry you right away.”

Dohga looked up blankly.

“You don’t have to get hitched immediately. You could just do a betrothal. You just need to tell her how you feel.”

Dohga didn’t say anything.

“If you stand by for much longer, you’ll regret it.”

“But…”

“Don’t worry about whether you’re a good match for each other. You’re one of Asura’s Golden Knights. We in the guards are proud of you, and we look up to you. Hold your head high and put yourself out there.”

Dohga thought a little. He didn’t know what made people compatible, but he knew a little about looks. Isolde was too beautiful to be a good match for him.

“You don’t need to expect anything. Tell her how you feel and get your heart broken. At this rate, you won’t be able to wish her well on her wedding day.”

At these words, Dohga immediately made up his mind. He was going to tell Isolde how he felt.