“Whaaaaaa?! You want me to quell a rogue monster?”
It was roughly twenty years ago that Watt Sears was given a single order: to defeat a rogue monster—a monster that had wandered into an area where people had already settled after the other monsters in the area had been exterminated—that had appeared in a certain location within the Kingdom of Ogdenn.
As it was a territory of the kingdom, there should’ve been a noble lord ruling the land. Despite Watt’s insistence that leaving the matter to them would be the proper way of handling things, his superior at the time merely said it was an order and refused to budge an inch. It was an official order from the king, so Watt reluctantly set out with his Mechsteel partner.
“The hell? I was wondering what kinda monster went rogue, but nobody told me it was a dragon! Dammit, those bastards knew and still didn’t tell me!”
Awaiting Watt when he arrived on the scene was a massive dragon that seemed to rend the skies in two. Rushing to ascertain the situation, Watt discovered that the lord’s army had been practically annihilated right away. It seemed true that they had made an emergency request for support to the Centre.
“But still, there’s no way I can be the only reinforcements they sent, right?! I might’ve been born a commoner, but this is no time to try and play some nasty prank on me!”
Watt was indeed born a commoner, and he’d enlisted to join the Centre army. After rapidly distinguishing himself in the army with his skills, Watt found himself disproportionately shunned by those of noble birth around him. He couldn’t begin to count all the minor ways they’d found to harass him, but he never imagined he’d be thrown headfirst into such a dangerous situation. After all, even compared to other monsters, dragons boasted a level of power that was in a class of their own. Even Mechsteels, the massive magical instruments that they were, couldn’t compete with the likes of dragons. Indeed, the lord’s army had now suffered the bitter blow of annihilation before the creature’s might.
What’s more, Watt was shocked to see that, in face of their own doom, the lord and his family had done the unthinkable and joined the fray themselves, prepared to die on the battlefield out of the belief that a noble’s duty was to protect those living in their domain.
“Hold up there, you idiots! Your pride doesn’t mean a thing if you go off and die! Get the injured off the front lines!”
It seemed the nobles of the land were of a different breed altogether than those fools in the Centre—there was no mistaking that they were still fools nonetheless, though. Watt couldn’t stand a single one of them, which was exactly why he angrily berated them...before taking on the ultimate beast entirely on his own in their place.
For three whole days, Watt and his partner waged a vicious battle against the creature before finally succeeding in quelling the “ultimate” monster.
The mere recollection of how flustered everyone around him had been when he returned back to the Centre carrying the dragon’s massive head was enough to make him smile even now.
The days that followed were marked by rapid upheaval in Watt’s life. His feat of “single-handedly quelling a dragon” was far too large of an achievement—he could be mocked for being a former commoner no longer. Soon thereafter, the king himself awarded Watt with a medal for his accomplishment, assigning him to the post of “Top Knight of the Kingdom.” The king had sought to parade his feat in quelling the dragon to the surrounding nations, but to say that it had been a mere knight of common birth that had done so would’ve lacked luster. And so, as if to eliminate any such issues, Watt found himself exalted.
Watt himself had never really cared how others viewed him, so he simply let matters run their course. After all, there was something far more important to him than all that—his encounter with Cullinagemia Turris, the daughter of the lord, who, alongside her family, had avoided certain doom thanks to Watt’s feats on the battlefield.
“Sir Watt, as knight, you have my deepest appreciation for not only quelling the dragon that appeared in our domain, but also for saving the lives of my kin.”
When the two first spoke, the first thing to catch Watt’s gaze was her rich, flowing crimson hair, followed by her jade-colored eyes beneath, glistening with resolve as they peered back at him. Indeed, she’d been ready to lay down her life for the sake of her pride as a noble. Those clear eyes of hers made her inner strength readily apparent. Watt remembered full well how he’d nearly been overwhelmed by how intently she’d looked at him as she spoke.
“So you were granted the rank of Top Knight of the Kingdom, were you? His Majesty has a discerning eye. I’ve no doubts that you’ll go on to become a splendid knight and cement your name in our kingdom’s history.”
Cullina called Watt a knight each time she met him. In her mind, the way Watt had faced off against the dragon with no regard for danger made him a true knight among knights... At least, that’s what seemed to be the case. It was the sort of praise that left him feeling awkward and uneasy. Watt had just been dropped into the middle of it all and snapped out in anger. He hadn’t wanted to square off with a dragon, but he’d been able to save her, so he’d come to believe that the end result of it all hadn’t been bad.
As the two continued to meet in secret, her presence brought about a change in Watt. He’d originally joined the army because he had nowhere else to flex his skills, and after joining, he’d continued on to spite the nobles.
He wielded his blade now not as proof of his own might, but in order to help another. Watt had taken up the behavior of a knight in order to be the knight she believed him to be.
He had the power to best even dragons—and he would wield that same power to keep people safe. It was inevitable that Watt’s renown as the Kingdom’s Top Knight would only grow even further in light of this.