Paladin of the End - Volume 4 - Chapter SS1

Poetry is Forever

Whence hailed he? To what hath his eyes borne witness? His arms are forged like the toughest steel, his hand holds a glittering blade of ice. By the unseeable celerity of his draw, evil’s pawns are stricken through. Whirlwind, The First Move Killer, Strider... Reystov the Penetrator. No swords clash afore him; naught lies there but the corpses of fallen foes clutching the holes in their chests.

— The opening lines of a troubadour’s tale in a Whitesails tavern

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During a feast one day after we had resolved a host of problems, I suddenly got curious. “You have a lot of exploits under your belt, right, Reystov?”

“Mm.” Reystov, sitting in a corner of the venue and holding a drink, nodded with his lips tightly shut. Recognizable by his dirty cloak, his unshaven face which gave no clues to his age, and the well cared for sword he carried, the man known by the nickname of the Penetrator was a pretty reticent person.

“I’d like to hear the stories of your earlier adventures,” I said. Reystov didn’t normally talk much about his achievements, and I wondered what kind of adventures he’d had. “Do you think you—”

“No.” He quietly shook his head. “Blowing your own horn is a bad habit. It leads to arrogance.”

“And arrogance dulls your blade?”

“Right.” Reystov nodded, keeping his words to a minimum. He had an imperturbable, dignified presence, like a rock covered in moss. I didn’t get any sense that he was interested in gaining fame by talking up his achievements. These were the words of a person who was less concerned with his present self and more with adding another thin sheet to his pile of training to make his sword sharper for tomorrow. As a fellow warrior, I could admire that.

“That again?!” Bee broke into the conversation. “This is why you’re no good. You’re so hard to make material for!” Judging by the slight color in her cheeks, it looked like she had a little drink in her.

“Oh, the troubadour.”

“Robina! Would you please remember my name already?!”

“Right.”

“You two know each other?” They were certainly acting that way. I looked at them in surprise.

“She interviewed me a few times.”

“And every time he’s like this! You... gloomy bore!”

Reystov didn’t appear to take Bee’s unreserved comment badly. He just slowly shook his head. “I won’t be any different the next time, either.”

“You’ve got all kinds of nonsense spreading about you,” Bee said. “You have a poet as great as me here offering to produce something a little closer to the truth for you, and you give me the brush-off. Honestly.” Bee exaggeratedly shrugged her shoulders, looked up into the air, and heaved a sigh. “Reputation’s important for an adventurer, isn’t it? Whether you’re just surviving or trying to make it big!”

“If you have skills, it comes naturally.”

“You know there are loads of skilled people who painted themselves into a corner when they let their bad reputation precede them! Look, I know you could be the greatest swordsman in Southmark with one hand tied behind your back, and I’ll admit I’m not saying I want to make a story for you just out of charitable good will, but seriously, you’d better think about how other people look at you! You never know what’ll be your undoing if you’re a warrior, do you?!” After rushing all that out in a single breath, Bee whipped around to look at me instead. “Don’t you think so, Will?!”

“Umm...” What Bee was saying made an awful lot of sense considering she was drunk, but I could also understand that Reystov probably wanted to devote the resources he’d have to spend on dealing with Bee to his sword instead. Since I couldn’t fully side with either of them, I attempted to change the topic a little. “So there’s a lot of nonsense being spread about Reystov’s exploits?”

Bee nodded. “This guy, he takes on a hunting request for some big beast, wanders casually out, strikes through the weak spot first time, and comes back, right?”

Ah, I could picture the problem.

“Carrying back the corpse of the beast uses other people, but he doesn’t fight alongside others much, and even when he does, he works so fast that most people can’t even tell what’s going on. And he takes jobs all over, so...”

“It keeps getting embellished?”

“Yep. I try to find information, but there’s so many blanks. So in the end, everyone just has to fill in the gaps with their imagination about what kind of life he leads, who he is, where he’s from, what started him adventuring... all of that.” Bee sighed. “I might dramatize it a bit, but I wanted to go for something a li’l more grounded...”

“Not interested.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

This was going nowhere.

Bee groaned. “If I only had a little more material, darn it.”

As I looked at her, an idea occurred to me. “Well, okay then, what about this to liven up the party?”

“Huh?” Bee tilted her head, confused.

As Reystov regarded me with suspicion, I made the following proposal.

“The Penetrator versus the Paladin.” 

Bee’s eyes lit up.

“You’ll accept, I assume?” I asked him.

“You’re stronger than I am. How could I refuse?” Reystov gave a wry smile, reluctantly playing along.

We both took up suitable-looking tree branches and rose unsteadily to our feet.

“Oh, this is good! This is great! I’ll turn it into a story that’ll be told for centuries, millennia, no, until the end of time!”

Hearing Bee’s excited shouts, the other people at the feast gathered their gazes on us. We stepped closer. The mighty blade trained by Blood crossed paths with a thrust of brilliant purple lightning, and the air filled with excited cheers.