Chapter 10

Damien had taken a leave of absence from the Royal Guards for the sake of the assignment.

When the other knights asked what was so important that he was using a leave he had never once touched before, he simply dismissed it as a personal matter. The young knights who had approached him with admiring eyes turned back with their shoulders slumping.

“Sir Xsanov. Come on, let your guard down just a little.”

An upper-ranking knight who had just finished a sparring match admonished him. He didn’t seem to mind much even though the sword in his hand had been cut quite short. The severed blade was rolling around on the floor.

Damien looked down at his magic sword, which had turned pitch-black in response to his mana, and replied:

“Since I’m going back to Luxen as soon as I graduate anyway, is there really any need to do that?”

“Who knows? Your mind might change later.”

He disliked this. The King and the Royal Guards following his orders continuously urged him to switch sides, and Damien found those persuasions deeply unpleasant, feeling as though they were clinging to his body like something sticky.

While it was natural for an ordinary knight to seek out a new lord who recognized his worth, before being the Grand Duke’s knight, Damien was his disciple and was deeply indebted to him. There was no reason whatsoever for him to change his allegiance.

“That is unlikely to happen.”

“How arrogant.”

Though he said that, the upper-ranking knight didn’t view Damien’s arrogant attitude with true malice. It was purely an expression of a aristocratic mindset—believing that a rare magic swordsman on the continent, one who had even defeated the South Duke at sixteen, ought to possess at least that much pride.

Guessing the knight’s true thoughts, Damien silently sheathed his sword. Since he couldn’t stop them no matter what he said, his only choice was to endure it until graduation.

He had been saving up his leave without using it, planning to stop coming to school altogether near graduation. His master, the Grand Duke of Luxen—who had originally told him to spend time like other kids his age since he had enrolled anyway—agreed with this plan as well.

As long as the War of Parpanan had not ended, there was no telling what the King might do to claim a larger share of the victory, so it was best to pull out as quickly as possible.

Still, taking a single day off was fine.

Although Arkin had questioned whether it was necessary to take such a risk for a mere assignment, Damien hadn’t taken the leave because of the project.

‘Rather than that…’

Wasn’t it closer to the fact that he simply didn’t want to be interrupted?

As soon as her class ended, Tislin headed toward the Department of Knighthood building.

Classes in the Department of Knighthood had apparently ended around the same time, because by the time Tislin arrived, the students had already scattered to the dormitories and training grounds. Thanks to that, the lecture hall corridor where she had agreed to meet Damien was quiet and empty.

Even so, Tislin ducked her body as she moved to avoid catching any student’s eye.

“Where is it…?”

He said it was around here.

“Over here.”

Damien was dressed in a neat, orderly uniform, looking as though he hadn’t trained today at all.

Even though he was wearing the exact same outfit as the Department of Knighthood students who had just passed by in the opposite corridor, standing there alone made him stand out immensely. Fortunately, the corridor was empty for now, but anyone walking down this path would have no choice but to turn their eyes toward him.

To make matters worse, there was a classroom behind where Damien was standing that was still in the middle of class. Her neck involuntarily shrank.

“U-Um, can’t we do it somewhere without people?”

“Why?”

Ciera was right about having to tell him the moment they met. Tislin let out a sigh and lightly tugged on Damien’s sleeve. Looking down at her with surprised eyes, he followed along obediently.

Only after they had moved far enough down the corridor so that they couldn’t be seen from the classroom did Tislin speak.

“I want to keep our engagement a secret. Is that okay?”

When no answer came, Tislin grew a little anxious.

“Even if you won’t break off the engagement, you can at least grant me a favor like this…”

She felt it was a pathetic thing to say. However, if rumors spread, breaking off the engagement would become far more difficult.

Even if she somehow managed to break it off, it would still be a problem. A woman who broke an engagement with Damien Xsanov? That was a label that would follow her until she passed marriageable age.

“Sure, I can do that.”

That was all Damien said after a long silence.

Tislin snapped her head up. Damien was quietly looking down with a somewhat complex expression. An betrothed who asked to hide their engagement as if it were an embarrassing matter—no fiancé would feel pleased about that.

‘That’s why we should just break off the engagement.’

Since they had only recently gotten engaged, nothing substantial had been exchanged between their families yet, meaning they could end it cleanly. Put another way, the more time dragged on, the more complicated breaking it off would become.

“I get that you don’t want to stand out. Let’s go somewhere else then.”

Tislin quickly nodded. Damien hadn’t given a firm promise, but she didn’t have the nerve to push him for a definitive answer.

Following his straight back down the corridor, an iron door appeared that she hadn’t even known existed. It was a door that clearly hadn’t been opened in a long time, yet Damien opened it without hesitation.

“Is it okay to open this place?”

“It was just closed for convenience. It’s not a door you aren’t allowed to open.”

That’s a relief then. Tislin carefully stepped over the threshold.

“As if I’d bring you to a place like that.”

Closing the door and following behind her, Damien spoke with a low chuckle. Tislin stubbornly looked only at her feet as she walked. If she raised her head right now, her face would flush awkwardly again. She didn’t want to show him a sight like that.

After walking down a deserted path for a while, a building she had never seen before came into view. Judging by the architectural style and the ivy climbing up the walls, it looked to have been built quite a long time ago.

Tislin touched the wall of the old building once with her hand before following Damien inside.

Inside the building made of white stone, the air itself felt chilly, making her involuntarily hunch her shoulders.

“It won’t collapse.”

Thinking she might be scared, Damien spoke as if to reassure her, before adding after a brief silence:

“Even if it does collapse, taking one of you out isn’t difficult.”

If she had genuinely been scared, those words wouldn’t have brought much comfort, but Tislin simply nodded her head.

Heading further inside, they settled down in an empty lecture hall. It seemed the building wasn’t entirely abandoned, as the magic lights functioned properly and the classroom was clean.

Tislin took out her reference materials and a blank notebook from her bag.

“I gave it some thought, and I think it would be good to divide it like this overall: political system, geography, economy, culture, military, and history. If we split it in half, won’t we finish quickly?”

“Sure.”

She had even brought a map that filled two full pages, though it wasn’t quite as large as the one Professor Keron used.

“Rather than geography itself, the branches stemming from geography will be key. Developed water transportation, the military power capable of maintaining a corps of mages, an economy centered around luxury goods, and the local governorship system. In that case, it would be better to place geography at the very top.”

Her mouth hurt from talking so much. Keeping an eye on Damien’s reaction, Tislin wrote ‘Geography’ in the top paragraph.

“I didn’t think there would be much material on the military in the library, so I brought some things that might serve as a reference. There are parts that can be applied to geography and the administrative system as well.”

Damien opened a stack of books piled on one side of the desk and showed them to her.

“Uh, you did research?”

“It’s an assignment, so naturally… Did you really think I intended to ride your coattails?”

Responding in a surprised tone, Damien caught the meaning behind her words and let out a dry laugh.

“No, I just thought you were busy. Anyway, it’s great that you came prepared.”

He seemed to have prepared far more meticulously than she expected. Tislin nodded as she flipped through book pages that bore obvious signs of having been read over a long time. It seemed he had been reading these books even before participating in the War of Parpanan.

There were several other volumes as well. Tislin pulled them out one by one and skimmed only the tables of contents.

“This… To melt all of this in, we’d basically have to write a book.”

“Let’s not go that far.”

On that point, there was a clear consensus.

“As for the political system… isn’t what we know everything there is? The Emperor, bureaucrats, and local governors.”

There was a reason they only knew that much.

“Yeah. Because the rest doesn’t function.”

Since they didn’t engage in diplomacy, there was no reason for a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and since taxes weren’t collected according to fair standards, tax collectors were essentially a position existing solely for extortion.

The nation’s finances, rather than being managed systematically, were spent on the fly according to the Emperor’s whims. If funds ran short, they squeezed their citizens or plundered foreign nations. Literally.

If one asked how on earth a country like this had managed to run for half a century…

It was because no one could resist.

Hezra’s overwhelming force. With a single sword, that overwhelming force—reminiscent of the legendary mages said to have summoned meteorites and raised hellfire in ancient times—made all resistance meaningless.

It was said there were rebellion attempts in the early days. However, after a few massacres where cities that served as bases for rebellion were entirely wiped out, people naturally began to suspect and report one another out of fear of repercussions.

In this way, the terror surrounding Hezra, an unprecedented magic swordsman, was enough to leave half the continent utterly paralyzed. It was something the younger generation, who had never seen Hezra, couldn’t quite grasp.

“We should write that down too.”

Damien made a brief note under the history section and recorded the titles of reference books.

He also wrote down briefly under the military section the fact that all external attempts to invade Parpanan had been thwarted.

Although some had succeeded in the end, it wasn’t important. Damien had no intention of blabbering about the past war in a simple assignment.

“Should the personal details of the Emperor and the Four Dukes go at the beginning?”

“That would be fitting.”

“Since there aren’t four anymore, let’s just write three.”

Thanks to that, the workload reduced slightly. Delighted, Tislin drew a firm line through ‘Four Dukes’ and revised it to ‘Three Dukes.’

Barbanote of the North. Tartarivrey of the West. Horkineer of the East.

“You haven’t met the other dukes, right?”

“No. I heard the other dukes didn’t send reinforcements during the war with southern Parpanan either.”

That was truly strange. Was there a power struggle among themselves as well?

“Setting the other two aside, the West Duke is a tremendous mage, isn’t he? Even so?”

“Even so.”

Isn’t that why we’re all still alive?

Thinking of Hezra and the West Duke, who reportedly hadn’t shown his face even when the south was completely occupied, Tislin tapped the tip of her pen against the paper.

“Out of the Four Dukes, the South Duke was the only magic swordsman, and the south had the strongest military force. Doesn’t that mean Parpanan is quite weakened right now?”

“If you’re asking why we aren’t attacking them, it’s because the Allied Forces are just as weakened.”

Tislin was momentarily lost for words.

“…To that extent? But we won.”

“We were lucky.”

When the ‘Slayer of the South Duke’ spoke like that, she had nothing to say. It wasn’t a setting where humility was required, nor was there any reason for him to disparage his own achievements.

The state of the country is just…

Feeling stifled, Tislin summarized and wrote down what they had discussed so far before standing up from her seat.

“I’ll step outside for a moment to get some fresh air.”

Opening the lecture hall door revealed a long corridor stretching out to both sides. Tislin froze in her tracks, her toes hooked on the threshold.

“Uh, which way was the exit again?”

“I’ll walk you out.”

As a result, the two walked out side by side.

They were walking down the long corridor without a single word when, just as they rounded a corner—

“Oho. It’s pretty eerie here, isn’t it?”

Along with an unfamiliar voice, the main entrance at the far end of the corridor suddenly swung open.