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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 9
Chapter Title: Suspicious Traces
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Edward Norton. The eldest son of the Norton Viscount family, who had served the Cligrove Count house for a long time.
"How long are you going to keep calling me 'sir' so stiffly? I've been asking you to call me by name ever since we trained with swords together as kids, right up to now."
"Once I become count, I'll have to make you my vassal anyway. I don't see the point in changing it twice."
Edward spoke with a look of disappointment, but Lenia responded with her usual impassive face. Seeing this, Edward sighed inwardly.
As a child, when he was learning the sword from his father, who was the knight commander at the time, he met Lenia for the first time.
Back then, she wasn't the count's daughter—she was just a trainee receiving knight training—so Edward hadn't paid her much attention. She was nothing more than a scrawny kid with gloomy gray hair and eyes.
But like a swan hatching from a cygnus chick, she began to reveal her beauty as time passed.
Her gray hair transformed into beautiful blonde, as if shedding its shell, and her dull gray eyes started gleaming like the finest turquoise.
And her swordsmanship? Just one month after starting training, she defeated him, who had been practicing for a full year.
Her growth rate surpassed that of a human. Edward's father had evaluated her that way. By age sixteen, no knight in the order could beat her with pure swordsmanship alone, and at twenty, she became the youngest aura user in history.
It was only natural for the count to adopt her as his daughter and heir after seeing that. He had no children of his own, and becoming an aura user at twenty practically guaranteed she'd reach swordmaster.
"Enough idle talk. Go to the rear and make sure the soldiers stay in line. There are sure to be some who'll ditch supplies claiming they're too heavy. Stop that."
"...Understood."
Countless ladies would throw handkerchiefs at him or deliberately go weak in the knees and faint when they saw him. With his blonde hair, blue eyes, and the white, even teeth revealed in his smile, Edward was publicly acknowledged as a beautiful young man.
Yet even he couldn't capture Lenia's interest.
'Come to think of it, she's never shown interest in men since she was little...'
Even when they trained together, she never spared him a glance. Even when noble ladies came to watch him practice, she swung her sword as if they existed in another world entirely.
He rode back to check on the soldiers. It felt a bit excessive for the knight commander to do it personally, but orders were orders.
Once Edward was gone, Lenia stared coldly ahead. Her mind was a whirlwind of war.
The war she'd tried so hard to avoid had finally broken out, and avoiding it was no longer an option. All that remained was to win and claim the victor's rights.
'What will Sarisa Count do...?'
Though both were counts, a count with a city and one with just a castle had vastly different economic power. But the one who declared war first was Sarisa Count.
She had suspected he had some scheme in mind. The problem was she didn't know what it was.
As she rode on, pondering this, she handed the lead to another knight to check on the soldiers herself and headed toward the rear of the column.
"The lady's coming!"
Whenever she passed soldiers on horseback, they scrambled to straighten up from their trudging pace. To them, Lenia was an untouchable high existence, so they hid their sloppiness on their own.
As she surveyed the troops while passing through the ranks, her gaze suddenly stopped. It fixed on the mercenaries gathered together.
Unlike the soldiers, they didn't bother straightening up when she arrived. They were free-spirited, but they always kept their weapons at hand, ready to draw and fight at any moment. And among them stood someone who caught the eye more than anyone.
'That guy's...'
Mercenaries were usually big. Not that only big people became mercenaries, but the small ones mostly died off. Whether facing monsters or humans, only the tough survived countless battles.
Still, the man Lenia spotted was enormous. Towering two heads above the other mercenaries, he carried a massive sword slung over his shoulder that was 20 to 30 cm longer than a standard two-hander, perfectly matching his build.
The nameless man she'd seen at the camp. She wanted to get closer and hear the answers he hadn't given back then, but he was in the middle of the column.
Her status was too high to weave through the soldiers or call him out specially.
Pulling a standout male mercenary aside for a chat would stir rumors for a while. Suppressing the urge, she thought that since he was joining the war, they'd meet eventually anyway.
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The march continued until sunset. The soldiers, burdened with 30 kg of gear—shovels, personal tents, rations, and more—dropped their loads the moment camp was called.
The mercenaries were no different. Unlike the rank-and-file kept in line by officers, they just flopped down wherever.
"It's later than I thought for setting up camp. With night watch to assign and dinner to prep, it'll be tight."
In the end, Cutter—nah, Cutter decided to use formal speech with me. I use casual with him. He's older, but it's by strength, or whatever.
Anyway, as he said, the halted army was lax, and with sunset approaching, camp prep turned into chaos.
"....That's why I ended up as a mercenary. My family was starving to death—what choice did I have? Still, I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm alive, aren't I?"
Around a crackling campfire, I chatted with the mercenaries in my squad.
Mercenary work was the last resort for the uneducated poor, so it wasn't surprising many, like me, were former serfs.
Cutter started after watching his family starve. Simson turned to it after banditry in another country. Each had their story. Then their eyes turned to me.
"I was a hunter. Pay was decent, but I didn't have the confidence to stick with it forever, so I came looking for a path to success."
There were other reasons, but that was the big one. Success. Becoming a noble. A simple dream, but far from simple. The mercenaries smiled faintly.
A serf rising to nobility was the stuff of legends and hero tales.
For an illiterate, uncultured man to succeed through martial prowess alone—that was how impossible it was.
If another mercenary had said it, they might've burst out laughing and mocked him.
The sun had set, leaving only campfires and starlight on the plain. Even the waist-high scrub had been hacked down by soldiers and mercenaries, leaving it barren.
In the midst of chatting, a strange feeling made me look up.
A faint musky smell and a chilling sensation. I'd felt it once before.
Hunters trespass beast territories constantly, but even they avoid apex predators' domains.
Those beasts mark their turf to warn intruders, so hunters steer clear. But one winter, desperate after days of empty hunts, I'd been bold.
I stepped into a predator's territory. Fresh claw marks on trees, shed fur everywhere.
A snarling beast could've appeared any second. That's where I felt this—musk, a spine-chilling killing intent.
"Something's out there."
At the dark plain's edge, faint moonlight hit something standing there. Too dim, too far to make out. It probably hadn't noticed me either.
It stared this way for a while, then quietly vanished.
"What do you mean?"
"Just what I said. Something was there. Not sure what..."
I stood and headed toward where it'd been. It was quite a distance from camp.
Soldiers prepping for watch eyed me curiously as I split off, but said nothing. Mercenary, after all.
"Around here..."
I borrowed a torch from a nearby soldier and searched the approximate spot.
Finding traces of an unknown something in pitch black relying on one torch wasn't easy, but years as a hunter guided me to the clues in the dark.
"A horse?"
Horse hoofprints and a bit of hair. Plains could have wild horses, but the prints showed clear artificial horseshoes.
Easy to tell it was a domesticated horse. And that meant one thing.
"Cavalry... Enemy cavalry? Plus, the hoof size and depth aren't standard for imperial horses."
From experience feeding baron's horses, I knew this wasn't an imperial breed—small but mountable.
That sparked unease. Small warhorses weren't common. At most, nomadic tribes used them. And the nearest nomads to the empire were...
"The northern elves."