Chapter 170
Filling the Wineglass with Blood (2)
Antoine took his stance and held his hand upon his sword’s hilt, his face brimming with confidence.
The more he quivered with arrogance, the more concerned I became. The memory flashed before my eyes of the mercenary commander who had once boasted of a verse as if it was a high treasure from heaven, and yet it proved so crude that it could barely be called a dance poem.
“Then I’ll start,” said Antoine as he drew his sword, his great arrogance clearly bringing him satisfaction.
‘Chaha!’ his sword aura bloomed over his blade as his qi noisily synthesized.
I recognized it as the swordsmanship of an Advanced Sword Expert, and it was a great improvement compared to when I had first met him. However, I didn’t want to see a common sword aura. I wanted to hear was Antoine’s poetry, the poetry that was unique to him.
He waited for a while as his energy began to run wild, with his sword aura rising in intensity, and once the concentration of his energy reached a peak, Antoine’s lips began to move.
“I am the crimson blade that cuts the red sword!”
‘Schwaak!’ Antoine’s sword blazed with a red light, and his face became flushed. His face turned almost as red as his sword.
I had expected more, and my expectations had been thrown to the wayside. My mood was clear to see on my face, yet Antoine didn’t care about my feelings.
“Synthesize! Synthesize!” Red traceries appeared and disappeared before him, and he touched his heated face as I kept watching his loud demonstration.
Looking past the terrible lyrics of the poem, the power of Antoine’s Muhunshi itself was quite good. There was a sense of dignity and promise to it, and I knew that it could break through the fervor of an orc warrior if he properly channeled it.
It was no more and no less than a [Extraordinary] level of poetry.
If it is properly polished and refined, it will proffer a useful level of power if one compares it to the Knights of the Ring.
The problem was the brevity of his poem, the fact that it focused on only a single moment. Still, he had gone through dozens of battles, and he had remained alive after facing dozens of orcs. Antoine even survived the battle against the great legion led by the king of the orcs.
Yet, his poetry spoke only of the moment of defeating the enemy that he faced, and this was a pity.
But I tried my best to suppress such a mindset, for different people use different strokes. While some look beyond to the end of a war, others focus only on the points of their swords.
Antoine was one of the latter types, and it would be an offense borne from my own arrogance if I dismissed him as being insignificant.
I opened my mind and looked for Antoine’s strengths, and there was one: The utility gained from his crude song.
The poem’s lyrics were simple, and the song was sung for a mere moment, so Antoine was not burdened by using the poem. That meant he could use the power of his poetry for an extended time, just like the man who was called the mercenary king and his [Golden Poem].
And this similarity was because Antoine’s origin was no different than that of the mercenary king.
“Ah,” and suddenly, a good idea entered my mind.
If it worked out well, I would be able to pass on a new poem to a man and his comrades who could only write crude lyrics with their minds.
However, it was paramount to check their achievements first.
After his demonstration, I asked Antoine about the employment of the [Poetry of True Soul] that I had passed on to the Silver Foxes in exchange for a twenty-year contract.
Antoine’s face had been confident; it was now wracked by regret.
“It speaks of a mountain of dark green corpses and a pool of blood, so there’s not a sense of relevancy in it to us – there is no continuity,” came his answer.
It was at Winter Castle where battles against orcs are most frequent, so I had thought that the mercenaries would be able to digest the power of the poem to some extent, but the results weren’t great.
Antoine once more had a quivering face, and I knew that he was like a weak ember that could not burn a single cloak, and the same held true for the other mercenaries.
Their poems, like Antoine’s, were sung only to mark brief moments, and only a few of them had been able to properly draw out the power of the dance poem that I had passed on to them. And once the flames were lit, these few quickly had their energy exhausted, so it was impractical for them to use [Poetry of True Soul].
I was not disappointed, and even if it might be simple and clunky verses, they had still woven their own dance poems. And if they could do this, then I had a way in which to augment their power.
“You guys wait in one side.”
I arranged Antoine and the other mercenary knights on one section of the courtyard and told the next group of men to step forward.
They were those who were once Knights of the Rings, who were now Knights of the Heart – the broken swords of the royal family. Their gazes were hostile, and they had little desire to be tested by me like Antoine and the other mercenaries. I experienced a strong resistance to my orders, and not one of them came to stand before me after repeated orders to do so.
“Hmm.”
Then, Gwain stepped up. His mood toward me had not changed after our return to Leonberg, and the same counted for Trindall and Kampra.
“Do not be mistaken,” said Gwain, “I just want to have this done with so I can get some rest.”
He drew his sword, not giving me the chance to respond to his words.
‘Wooo~’
And the [Poetry of Shadows] he had woven in Dotrin’s forest came from his lips.
His sword turned black, and it was darker than before. The energy and spirit I felt contained in it were also far heavier, on a higher level incomparable to the past. Surviving the battle against the Overlord certainly had helped his development along.
‘Scchk~’ after the demonstration, Gwain immediately sheathed his sword and stepped back into the ranks of his comrades. As if having waited, Trindall stepped forward.
That was the beginning. After Gwain’s troupe had finished their demonstrations, the others decided that they would not be one-upped, and they came forward, one by one.
“I wrapped wind over my sword’s broken tip”
“Wind’s sound is the wailing of my blade”
And a wind blew as the knight recited his poem.
“A sword that once shook now stands upright”
“What can this sword not cut?”
And this knight’s sword seemed to stretch out, becoming longer.
“Even though a broken piece of iron it be”
“Hope alone will not hurt my foe”
Dozens of shrapnel-like lights flashed out from another knight’s sword.
I carefully stored the powers of the poems and swordplay they demonstrated to me in my memory.
While the poems of the Silver Foxes had been simple but exciting, these knights have woven poems filled with abstraction and gloom.
The nature of the Silver Foxes’ poetry was such that they could make the effects last for a long time, whereas the poetry of these knights, while difficult to maintain for long, had greater might blow by blow.
It was the result of the inherent difference between those who prioritize survival and those who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for victory.
After I had gone through all their poems, I stationed them across from the Silver Foxes.
I looked at those who remained: They were the natives of the north whose talents had been confirmed and who had then been accepted as knights. The songs they sang bore a strong resemblance to the military songs of Winter Castle, and some had even taken the verses of my war songs into their poems.
The karma and qi of these poems were also no different from [Poetry of True Soul]. The only difference was the color of the flames, as they blazed in red, yellow, or blue.
They were all [Extraordinary] dance poems.
In the end, I had checked all the dance poems of nearly five hundred knights and then grouped them all into different squadrons on the fly.
Those who hosted Death Knights, Gwain included, were gathered into a squadron, and I named them the [Dusk Knights].
The remaining royal knights were split into two squadrons, and I named them the [Dawn Knights] and [Twilight Knights].
The skilled mercenaries who had been able to become knights were called the [Silver Fox Knights], taking on their original company name.
The knight squadron composed of the native northerners was called the [Blizzard Knights].
Bernardo Eli was assigned the command of the Knights of Twilight, Dusk, and Dawn, while the Silver Fox and Blizzard Knights were placed under Arwen.
Although having been split between two commanders into mixed squadrons, there were no complaints.
After I had formed the five squadrons, I called the Silver Fox Knights forward.
“The payment I had given you the first time around has been of no use to you, so I will set up a new contract.”
In exchange for their promised twenty years of service, I handed them a new poem.
Their payment came in the form of the [Golden Poem] that was used throughout the life of the mercenary king, a man who had been mad for money.
Of course, I knew that it was almost impossible to make someone else’s dance poetry truly yours, but it didn’t matter if they couldn’t master it completely. All I was hoping for was that the [Golden Poem] would provide them with a source of power.
It was not a decision I would have normally taken. If it had been another dance poem, I would not have passed it to so many knights at once, even after waking up as a human. This was because the indiscriminate transmission of poetry inevitably undermines the character of the verse.
But in this case, I did not hesitate. As this was a poem about goddamned money, I could pass it on to thousands rather than hundreds of knights. And I was also taking my revenge by doing so.
I was still angry with the man who had dared to sell me. I still remembered it so clearly: The figure of the guy who had sold me for a pouch of gold without a moment’s hesitation, turning around and walking off.
I had known that he was crazy about money, but I had not expected that the extent of his greed was so great. And after all these centuries, my shock and anger remained just as raw as it had been then.
“Fuck him,” I swore, getting angry all over again. The Silver Fox Knights looked at me with amazement and then said that they liked the new poetry very much.
“Even if it’s not your poem, do as you wish with it,” I said, and the knights looked at me with some surprise.
Just like the mercenary king had sold me for some gold, so have I now sold his karma and qi to mercenaries in exchange for their contract. It was not a regrettable deal, and I rather enjoyed conducting it.
Once I was done dealing with the Silver Foxes, I looked at the Dawn, Dusk, and Twilight Knights. I was hoping to pass on a poem to them as well, a dance poem paired with the hearts of blood and death that they had formed within themselves.
It was a song perfect for scarred knights, yet it wasn’t time to share it just yet.
I would wait until the hatred in their hearts found a new target to direct itself at.
So, it would be after they arrived in the capital that they would take on the new poem.
* * *
Having finished the organization of the knights, I rushed to prepare for our departure from Winter Castle. And even while I made my preparations, the situation in the empire was constantly changing.
The Wyvern Knights, led by the King of Dotrin, have plunged the eastern part of the empire into chaos.
An imperial duke had fearlessly gathered an army and marched to subjugate Hwaryong, which was a good thing for me, as a few more once intact estates have been scorched away by the enraged fire dragon as a result.
((The imperial family has issued a severe warning to all nobles, saying that any family who takes the initiative and provokes Hwaryong will face the gravest punishment))
Montpellier’s voice from beyond the crystal ball was full of sorrow as if the world has collapsed.
And indeed, the current situation was not so different from the end of the world, for Hwaryong’s wrath had been unleashed upon Montpellier’s territory. It is said that most of his family members have been annihilated by fire, along with the castle they were in.
All that now remained for the Montpelliers were the several businesses that the family operated across the empire. The arrogant marquis was heartbroken.
Yet, such sorrow did not render him helpless, for as the situation worsened, Montpellier began to cooperate with me more actively. He was in regular contact with many highly-placed individuals in the empire so that he could tell me everything that was happening there. And he was meticulous in his reports, missing nothing.
It was natural; it was so natural.
With almost all of his imperial holdings lost, Montpellier was now faced with two options: Stay in the kingdom and keep the title of a capable ambassador, or return to the empire and risk the silent sword of the emperor.
The future he chose was the former.
((I will do my best. Please believe me this time))
The desperation in the voice flowing from the crystal sphere was clear.
((Damned emperor, motherfucker!))
So desperate was Montpellier that he cursed his Majesty the Emperor, and the marquis was creating all kinds of curse words to describe the imperial ruler.
Once upon a time, I had put a leash on Montpellier, and he had acted like my dog. Now, it really seemed as if he had become my loyal hound.
“We’ll talk once I arrive there.”
I made no promises regarding Montpellier’s future, as there were too many people who have shed blood and tears because of the harm he had done to the kingdom.
If there was no other way for him to pay for such sins, I would kill him.
((I can only trust in your Highness’s path. Long live Prince Adrian Leonberger! Long live the rising star of the kingdom!)) Montpellier screamed shrilly, and I removed my hand from the crystal ball.
And the next day dawned.
If one included the hundred ghostly Death Knights in the tally, six hundred knights and a hundred palace knights were lined up in front of the south gate. Fully armed rangers and the heavily armored arquebusiers were gathered there as well.
“Our preparations are over.”
Nogisa and the other Masters surrounded me.
After we had passed through the south gate, Vincent said his goodbyes after riding out with us.
“Please go carefully,” he told me.
“I will come back, and I will see you again,” I greeted him.
“We wish your Highness the Crown Prince luck!” came the greeting of the rangers from behind me as we left Winter Castle. As we traveled, the extreme cold disappeared, and we entered the central region of Leonberg. The closer we got to the capital, the harder my heart beat in my chest.
I once held a conversation with my uncle shortly after I had seen the reality of the kingdom, and it now passed through my head.
“Uncle… I changed my mind.”
I had told this to my uncle, whose eyes had stretched wide.
“I’m going to be the king.”
Thus had I promised that I would revive this fallen kingdom.
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