“My shoulders are getting kinda stiff,” Franz said after they’d spent a long time on the board game.
“Why don’t we go stretch our legs in the garden?” Connie suggested.
“Sounds good. I’d like to take in some fresh air too.”
“All right.”
Hagen and Emmeline also agreed, so the group left the room.
“Ah, great-great-grandpa.” Connie saw Sazaki sitting on a bench in the garden.
“Oh, if it isn’t Connie and company. It’s nice to meet you. You can call me Korou.” Sazaki just happened to be in the garden. He assumed that with a “Ferd,” “Elrica,” and even “Sazaki” in the same place, Connie’s friends would figure out they were the Hero’s party, which would lead to trouble. So, he instead introduced himself by an alias he often used. “I heard you were playing that board game. I tried it as well, but the difficulty level’s all wrong. There should be more friendly dragons. At the very least, they should have been present on the large battlefields,” Sazaki complained.
“Oh, so it really was like that.” Connie nodded.
Judging from his appearance...he must have participated in the great war. As Emmeline observed their conversation, she was convinced that Sazaki was from the generation that had experienced the war.
“Were there any conditions for allied dragons to appear?” Franz asked Sazaki without any hesitation.
“Hmm... Ah, I see. Conditions, huh? Now I get it. How about searching for a place that looks like a dragon valley and breaking stuff here and there?”
“Huh?” From a young person’s perspective, Sazaki’s reply was really strange.
“Hmm? What, you don’t know the details about how our allied dragons joined the battle?” Sazaki was also a little puzzled, noticing that Franz and the rest seemed confused. “The Hero—though this story took place before he was called that—stormed into the valley where it was rumored that the dragons who’d given way to mankind slept, and he woke them all up. He became pretty famous back then for entering their sanctuary uninvited and wrecking it. Everyone my age knew the story, at least. There should be plenty of documents about it too.”
“Th-Those documents do exist, but you’re saying that actually happened?” Emmeline asked.
“Yeah. You should forget anything you’ve heard about the Hero being a man of irreproachable conduct. Everyone who knew him back then described him as a weirdo.”
“What...?” Emmeline’s impression of the Hero changed slightly after hearing a testimony from someone who’d lived back then, but just as Sazaki said, that incident had been quite famous during the great war.
“It would have been a major incident in times of peace. The Hero was actually disliked by some because he ignored appearances, honor, and protocol, and instead just plunged straight ahead using the shortest, most efficient route. Even a brat like me could hear people arguing whether they should enter the dragons’ territory or not, yet some random boy from who knows where went and destroyed the place. The church powers at the time thought he was truly shameless.”
Back when Ferd had still been a duo with Sazaki, he’d trespassed on—practically attacked—a land that the church—and the gods themselves—had designated as a sanctuary for the dragons who’d passed the world on to mankind and fallen into near-death sleep. Therefore, the mortal races had been arguing over whether or not it was acceptable to trespass on these sacred lands to awaken them, as the dragons would undoubtedly side with them.
But even though Ferd hadn’t reached the peak of his strength yet, he’d grown strong enough to destroy the sanctuary’s barrier, after which he and Sazaki broke in and woke up all the sleeping dragons. And Ferd’s plan had been successful. In the period between the first massive threat to mortals’ survival and the full formation of the Hero’s party, the dragons had successfully held the demon army back, albeit just barely, and derailed the Great Demon King’s plans.
From the Great Demon King’s perspective, since even the clergy had been told not to enter the sanctuary, he’d assumed that even if the dragons were awakened, it would have happened much later. In fact, his assumptions hadn’t been wrong, as the church forces had been in major conflict, with one faction creating Elrica and trying to oppose the Great Demon King no matter what, and the other prioritizing the gods’ will above all. It was just no one expected the anomaly that was Ferd.
However, the church hadn’t been the only power facing internal conflict during the war.
“Ah, it seems that during the first stages of the war, national governments were also arguing with each other. Apparently, each country and each race was trying to make sure they would suffer the least damage. But that’s only natural. To put it bluntly, a king has to prioritize his own country’s interests. But in the end, many of them were nearly or fully destroyed.”
Just like Sazaki said, during the opening stages of the great war, when the notion of it being a battle for the survival of all mortal races hadn’t yet emerged, different countries’ interests hadn’t been unified, and the situation had been a far cry from the coordination Franz and the rest had shown on the game board.
“It’s impressive we won at all.” Sazaki shrugged as he recalled those early days.
“Achoo!”
As an aside, Sazaki and Ferd—who’d just sneezed because people were talking about him—had been decried as felons for what they had done to the sanctuary, but everything had been forgiven thanks to the dragons’ intercession and the results that followed.
After Franz and the others listened to Sazaki’s old stories, they greeted Lara, who had just arrived, and took a closer look at the garden, or more specifically, the training grounds.
“I see signs of some impressive training. Are you training too, Connie?” Franz’s attention was drawn to well-worn wooden swords or spears.
“Yeah. Both swords and magic are means to an end, so you have more options if you can use them both.” Connie was familiar with that equipment.
“I’ve seen a demonstration that swords can beat magic, but trying to master both at the same time is really hard, you know.” A short time ago, Emmeline would have said that it was better to master magic over the sword, but her values had been shaken after Falke broke through her barrier. Even so, she still believed that trying to master both magic and swordsmanship was unrealistic.
“I thought I’d just give it a go,” Connie replied.
“Well, it’s not a bad skill to have. It’s dangerous to use magic in crowded places, after all,” Hagen said.
“That’s true. Hey, Connie, can I take a swing?” Franz nodded at Hagen.
“Sure. You can try, but they’re pretty heavy, so be careful.”
“What, heavy?” After getting Connie’s permission, Franz picked up a wooden sword. “Whoa, you’re right. This weighs a ton.”
Just like Connie had warned, the wooden sword in Franz’s hands was incredibly heavy, and despite its lack of cutting edge, one could still easily beat someone to death with it.
“Magic is nice, but swords are also cool. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a swordsman,” Franz said.
“I can understand the sentiment,” Hagen agreed. Despite being students at the Magic Academy, the two of them seemed to appreciate the blades.
“Really?” On the other hand, Emmeline didn’t understand the men’s sense of adventure, so she was just puzzled.
“Oh, that’s right. Connie, are your great-great-grandparents here from Mr. Falke’s side or Lady Agnes’s side?” Franz said.
“They’re from Great-Grandpa Falke’s side.”
“Then since they’re Mr. Falke’s parents, perhaps they can teach me the secrets of swords and magic? Can I go ask them?”
“I-I think that should be fine...” Connie muttered. Franz must have some kind of special power! Connie swallowed his shock for the umpteenth time at Franz’s unexpected proposal.
Since Falke was highly skilled in both swords and magic, one could assume that his parents would also be well-informed on those two subjects. However, Franz had no idea that he was asking advice from the best of the best.
“You sometimes get people like him,” Sazaki said.
“It’s hard to judge based only on this,” Lara replied.
The two of them had been listening to the kids with their superhuman hearing, and they had a hunch when it came to Franz. Occasionally, a person was born who could unconsciously continue choosing the optimal solution and achieve maximum efficiency, or who was so loved by fate that they could even defy the more cruel hands that fate would have dealt them. The shining example of this was the tottering old man relaxing in his room.
“Excuse me. Do you mind if I ask you something?” the young man, taking control of his own destiny, said to the Lightspeed Blademaster and the Witch of Annihilation. If any of Sazaki’s or Lara’s apprentices had been here, they would have been stunned by how well he had chosen.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you know the innermost secrets of swords and magic?”
“If you draw your sword, you only need to think about killing. Something like that.”
“Don’t forget that the foundations of magic are death and destruction.”
Sazaki and Lara gave incredibly simple answers. In other words, both of these were destructive powers, immutably.
“Umm...”
Franz, as well as Hagen and Emmeline, who had been listening, were confused by the all too simple answers.
“At the end of the day, a sword is a tool for killing. Not just monsters, but people too. The term ‘lifesaving sword’ does exist, but I think swords only take lives.”
“Magic is the same. It’s a skill meant for destruction, and any applications that enrich people’s lives are merely by-products. If you don’t understand that, you’ll be swallowed by the abyss of magic.”
To put it bluntly, if you used them, you would either kill or be killed; this was a fairly well-supported opinion in this world. Even after the war, wild monsters still existed, so death always lurked around the corner and would swiftly come for anyone of naive convictions.
“If your enemy is human, couldn’t you capture them alive or something?” Franz asked.
“In my personal opinion, that’s never something worth considering. There are too many people with incomprehensible abilities, so if you waste your time trying to avoid landing a fatal blow, you’ll probably be the one to die,” Sazaki said.