Chapter 1:
The Path to Knighthood
I AM FIA RUUD, youngest of the Ruud family.
People always told me that I took after my beautiful mother, with my red hair and golden eyes. Odd, isn’t it? They’d compliment her, but they never called me beautiful.
That wasn’t the only thing I inherited from my mother, however. Her frame was small, she couldn’t gain muscle mass, couldn’t…well, even develop much of a chest. No training could fix that. That’s a problem if you want to be a knight.
Knights can own a domain, you see. Someone knighted by the king immediately becomes the head of their family, and the status of that family rises nearly to the level of nobility. But if that head dies and there is no knight to succeed them, the family in question is stripped of their status.
And so the children of knights all work hard to become knights themselves, including me. I’d longed to be a knight ever since I was young, even if it was an extremely difficult path.
Being the kingdom’s most prestigious profession, the pass rate for the knight’s exam was astonishingly low. The odds ranged from one in fifty to one in a hundred.
Knighthood was the most respected position in the kingdom, as it was given by the kingdom itself. Massive wealth came with the job, although not without good reason. Being a knight meant, after all, that you had a duty to protect the Royal Castle, its royalty, and the kingdom itself. Those duties branched off from there—from maintaining order within the kingdom, to patrolling the border, to dealing with the ever-rising tide of monsters, a knight’s work was never done.
I knew, being from a family of knights, that sword skill was the most vital talent for anyone hoping for knighthood. I’d polished my swordsmanship from a young age, and I never lacked for sparring partners. There were, after all, many knights in our domain, including my own siblings.
Eat, sleep, practice, repeat. For years I ran through this cycle. It was tough but fulfilling work…until I realized something.
I hadn’t won a single practice match. Not one.
In fact…I’d even lost to the newbie who’d started practicing only three months prior.
In fact, I’d time a step-in perfectly, and somehow my sword would be the one sent flying.
Why? Well…I didn’t have much talent for the sword.
Surely hard work will make up for my lack of natural talent, I told myself. I’m not trying to become the best knight in the world or anything. Just being a rank-and-file knight would be enough for me…
It might’ve been because knighthood was my dream, or simple stubbornness, but I was willing to do whatever it took to become a knight. My lack of talent didn’t discourage me from training. I eventually became just barely strong enough to enter a knight brigade—or at least, I thought so.
During that time, my siblings—blessed by their natural gifts—became knights and left the estate. Only my sister’s departure moved me; my brothers had ignored me after discovering I had no talent for the sword, so their absence meant little. As for my father, he discovered my ineptitude long before my brothers did. He’d been the first to pretend that I didn’t exist.
When he left to protect the western territories as the vice-captain of the Fourteenth Knight Brigade, I hardly noticed his absence.
So you see, that’s why opinions were divided as to whether or not I should go forward with the coming-of-age ceremony. My brothers, my father, my sister—they’d all been away, and none of them knew how much I had improved…or if I’d improved at all.
The coming-of-age ceremony itself was simple. When you turned fifteen, you’d pick up a stone, any stone, from anywhere. You’d then take that stone and show it to a diviner who would tell your fortune using the stone’s shape and color.
But my family had a special twist on that. Nothing changed if the person coming of age didn’t want to become a knight; but if they did, they’d have to hunt a monster for the magic stone inside. That would prove their strength.
Monsters are powerful, magical creatures that carry magic stones in their bodies. The stones vary in size depending on the strength of the creature. Many monsters inhabited the depths of the forest, so my sister tried to discourage me from becoming a knight at all. She wanted me to give up on it and simply get a normal stone.
The younger of my two brothers, on the other hand, said I had an obligation as the daughter of a knight to go after a magic stone, even if it killed me. My oldest brother simply didn’t care. As for my father, he left the decision to me—he didn’t care either.
What other choice could I make? If I wanted to become a knight, I had to collect a magic stone. So that’s what I would do.