She had a youthful face. Her purple hair was so dark it was almost black. She was usually a bright, cheerful sort, but she held her head in her hands and glared at me standing over her.
“What if you broke my skull, huh?!” she cried. “Your strength is otherworldly! You could have killed me!”
“Like I give a damn. That’s what you get for disturbing someone who’s trying to put their thoughts in order.”
“You are beyond heartless.”
The girl stood to her feet and followed me as I walked away. She was eighteen years old and of average height and build. She was also the second-in-command of my personal unit.
“Can’t you be just a little quieter, Aul?” I asked.
“But talking is in my nature.”
I sighed. Perhaps fearing another fist to the head, Aul took a few steps back.
“More importantly, that stuff the king was talking about sounds like bad news. Nobody wants to see demons around.”
I said nothing.
“Lt. Colonel?” Aul asked.
An instant later, she was grabbing her head again, because I’d punched it. Aul was always breaking the rules.
“You spied on us, didn’t you?” I said.
I’d put her in my unit precisely because of that tendency, but I’d never been able to straighten it out. In the end, I’d given up and accepted it was just a part of who she was.
“Ow. Sorry. But if the demons are up to something, then are we going to be moving out?”
“Perhaps. But not immediately.”
We’d move if we got the order. We were not to move out on our own, by our own accord, and harm the order of the status quo.
“Yeah, but what are they actually doing out there, I wonder.” Aul asked.
“Nothing good, that’s for sure,” I said. “If they’re out there sniffing around in secret, there has to be some reason for it.”
Demons weren’t like other demi-humans. They were openly hostile to humans. So if they were up to something in the shadows, there was a very good chance that it was bad news for us.
“In any case, if we get the order then we move out, we’ll drive them away. That’ll be that, right?” Aul announced.
“Don’t take them lightly, Aul. It’s the fast path to death.”
“Yeah, I know that. I mean, you’ve kind of literally beaten that point into all of us,” said Aul, clutching her head and taking a few steps back.
I sighed again.
I had been, and was, strict on Aul and the rest of my unit in training. I would not stand for any mistakes when it really counted.
“So what now?” asked Aul.
“Well, after what you just said, I can tell you’ve gotten slack. I’ll be overseeing the unit’s training this afternoon.”
“What?! B-but we’re fine! I mean, now that you’re a Lieutenant Colonel, you must be busy beyond belief! You have to use your brains as much as your body to do a good job, right? None of us want to hamper your responsibilities!”
“Look at you, being so nice all of a sudden. But don’t you worry. I’m ahead with work.”
“Oh man, this always leads to me getting beaten senseless by the rest of the unit . . .”
Aul tried to laugh it off, but her shoulders slumped and she fell into despair. We walked the castle halls, and before I knew it, a wicked grin had spread across my face.
✦ ✦ ✦
There was something like joy in Rose’s face as she talked about her old friend. She was a person who none of us in the rescue team had ever known. We of course knew of Rose’s impressive achievements as a Lieutenant Colonel, but we had never had the chance to learn about the people in her former unit, or who they were.
“Aul was always bright and positive,” Rose said. “No matter the circumstances, she was the unit’s pillar of support. But she never shut up, and she was always rowdy.”
She talked about the girl in a pretty rough manner, and yet her tone of voice was calm and relaxed.
“What work did your unit handle?” I asked.
“We disposed of dangerous monsters on the outskirts of the kingdom. We captured bandits. Those kinds of tasks can be handled by regular knights, too, but in our case, things were a little different.”
“Different how?”
“We handled by far the most dangerous tasks. We didn’t handle the small stuff. We took on the monsters living in areas where the magic density was thickest. We were dispatched to handle whole gangs. My unit was the type that could capture large groups of bandits without injury and handle dangerous monsters quickly and effectively.”
But there were only seven of you, weren’t there?
Which meant that Rose’s unit was tasked with near-impossible missions, and they completed them admirably. The types of monsters that lived in dense magical areas were extremely dangerous. And bandits, too, were all the more of a threat when they had the advantage in terms of numbers.
“My unit did what regular units couldn’t,” said Rose. “We battled demons, too, when they encroached on human territory.”
“Amazing.”
“But the hardest part wasn’t the bandits or the monsters. It was keeping all my idiots in line.”
“Y-your idiots?”
“My unit was a gang of problem kids. I mean, I made it that way when I selected them all and beat some sense into them.”
So she was doing things rescue-team style even before the rescue team existed. That makes sense. There was something of a practiced ease to the way she handled Alec and the others back when I joined.
“Are you saying that you assembled your unit yourself?”
“Yep. All the ordinary knights simply gave up before we even began. I picked out all the ones with potential, and even then, it was only seven. But we became an elite unit.”
I had to imagine that there were a lot of people who looked up to Rose and wanted to join her unit. But as for what happened to the vast majority of them when the training began, well . . . it wasn’t even worth asking.
“The funny thing about it,” mused Rose, “was that everyone who had potential always came with extra baggage.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“They ignored orders, they were lone wolves, they argued with their superiors, that kind of thing. They were the types you’d expect to be cut loose. But in terms of sheer abilities, all of them excelled.”
“Couldn’t have been easy for the men and women leading them, though.”
“You got that right. Those problem kids always leapt into the fray at will, carried out their work with a scowl, did what they had to do to get the job done, and came back without a scratch. Not the type that’s easy to handle for any leader. When I was putting my unit together, I didn’t care about age or gender. Every new recruit had a big mouth and a lot to say with it. But a few days of training quieted them down real good.”
“That sounds just like you,” I said with a chuckle.
I had to imagine that those knights all spent a few days in a hell of Rose’s making.
“That’s how I built my unit. It was a unit of misfits, to be sure, but all of them were strong. Well, until it happened . . .”
The calm look on Rose’s face faded. I gulped back nervously and waited for her to go on.
“We eradicated monsters, and we beat up gangs of bandits, but all of us were still human,” Rose said, each word carrying a heavy weight. “At one point, we were considered the strongest unit in the entire kingdom. That was when King Lloyd appointed us a mission.”
“A mission?”
Now that I had heard of what Rose’s unit had accomplished, I knew that the mission she spoke of had to have been something important. Something dangerous.
“That’s when it started,” said Rose.
“Oh?”
“For me, and for my unit, that was the beginning of the end.”
Rose didn’t even glance in my direction as she went on.
“They believed in me, and I believed in them. But that trust between us was also a weakness. We just didn’t know it at the time.”
And so Rose continued to tell the tragic story of the sins that still plagued her.